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» DEC 4 - 1926 
Co Cy 
<Xocie41 sew 






Division 
Section 


THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
WEW YORK BOSTON + CHICAGO DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimItEepD 
LONDON - BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lm, 
TORONTO 


THIS 
BELIEVING WORLD 


A SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF THE 
GREAT RELIGIONS OF MANKIND 


B 
LEWIS eae 


Author of 
‘*“STRANGER THAN FICTION: A SHORT HISTORY 
OF THE JEWS" 


WITH MORE THAN SEVENTY 
ILLUSTRATIONS AND ANIMATED 
MAPS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR 


New York 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1926 


All rights reserved 





Copyright, 1926, 
By LEWIS BROWNE 





Set up and electrotyped. 


Reprinted September, 1926. 
October, 1926. November, 1926. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORE 


To 
HeEGAweELyes 


@ fi A 
ayer 
1Mq 


aM 


APU i 
j \ ny 


A 7 MENG fe 


4 ni 0 





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


The author’s gratitude is due to the below-mentioned 
scholars for their painstaking examination and criticism of 
the various chapters of thts book dealing with their own 
fields of spectalized research: 


Professor F. J. Foakes Jackson, author of A History of 
the Christian Church, Introduction to Church History, etc. 


Professor Robert Ernest Hume, author of The Thirteen 
Principal Upanishads, The World’s Living Religions, etc. 


Professor Charles P. Fagnani, author of A Primer of He- 
brew, The Beginnings of History According to the Jews, etc. 


Professor Joshua Bloch, Chief of the Semitics Division, 
New York Public Library. 


The author ts indebted also to Dr. Leo Mayer of the 
Palestine Department of Antiquities, to Dr. W. F, Albright, 
Director of the American School of Oriental Research, 
and to Dr. Herbert Danby, Canon of St. George’s Cathedral 
Church in Jerusalem, for much kindly assistance in the 
gathering of material on the history of the three religions 
which have shrines in Jerusalem; to Anna W. Anspach, 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


of South Orange, for her careful reading of the proofs and 
preparation of the index; and especially to the Rev. W. H. 
Murray, of New York, whose unflagging interest in this 
book from its inception has been a source of vast encourage- 


ment and help. 
eas 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


PROLOGUE PPR in ee tare ee neg yok Pan eg Avi tit LO 


I. 


II. 


I. 


II. 


1 Reree it ah Cea) pie CNRS A OC a a 


THE BABYLONIANS . . 


BOOK ONE 
HOW IT ALL BEGAN 


(see ey Le EO IMIR Comedie VR Sega ROO OF 


1: How the savage tried to explain the evils that befell 
him—he imaginea all objects were animate—seil -preser- 
vation and magic. 2: Religion and faith defined— 
the technique of magic—the dawn of the idea of 
the ‘‘spirit’’—animism. 3: Man begins to think he 
can exploit the spirits—shamanism—the charlatan in 
the early advance of religion. 4: Fetishism. 5: Idol- 
atry—the beginning of sacrifice—of prayer—of the 
church, 6: ‘Taboo. 


rat Py i 4 


1: The attempt to coerce the spirits gives way to the 
attempt to cayole them—but magic woes nol disappear 
—sacrifices. 2: The seasonal festivals—sex rites— 
the sacraments. 3: How the great gods were created. 
4: How the ideas of sin, conscience, and future retri- 
bution arose—religion saves morality for a high price 
—prophet vs. priest. 5: How religion made society 
possible—and desirable—how it gave rise to art—the 
significance of Primitive Religion. 


BOOK TWO 


HOW RELIGION DEVELOPED IN 
THE ANCIENT WORLD 


MEM BPEL TS ho... 0 earn rose ll vente eens GO 


1: The primitive gods—-Druids—the mistletoe cult. 
2: lhe testivals—ihe great holocausts—beltane— 
Lugnasad—Samhain—ghost- worship. 


Pcie awe pets hua atts) OD 


1: The Semitic goddesses—how the Babylonian gods arose 
—trinities. 2: Ishtar and the sex rites—tholy prost.tu- 
tion—astrology. 3: The priesthood—its vices—and 
virtues. 4: The defects of the religion—polydemon- 
ism—a ritualized morality—Shabatum and mythology 
—contrast with Hebrew versions of same—fear. 


9 


Lh 


IV. 


Vis 


— 
o 


te 


IIT. 


CONTENTS 


‘THEA EGYPTIANS?) 9 tes es 


1: Original animal-worship—the growth of the gods— 
the priests. 2: The idea of monotheism emerges. 
3: tlhe reformation under Ikhnaton—reaction. 4: 
The religion of the masses—Osiris—the future life— 
why the pyramids were built. 5: The dead—the 
Judgment Day—the resort to magic. 


THE GREEKS 


1: The Minoan religion—how the Greek gods arose—the 
Olympian cult. 2: The Olympian cult fails—the 
learned take to philosophy. 3: The masses take to 
magic—and the ‘‘mysteries’—the savior-god idea— 
how men tried to become divine. 4: The desire for 
a future life—and how the mysteries satisfied it. 


THE ROMANS . 


1: Original worship of household spirits—the state reli- 
gion arises—anu is intensiied. 2: Why the state 
religion failed—the coming of the mysteries—C ybele— 
Attis—the other foreign cults. 3: Augustus restores 
the state religion—the god-emperor—the reaction—the 
Cynics. 4: Why decadent Rome took to the vet-ries 
—Mithras—its significance. 5: Conclusion—Why these 
ancient cults cannot be called “‘dead’’—the significance of 
their other-worldly appeal. 


BOOK ‘THREE 
WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 


BRAHMANISM 


1: The primitive Aryan gods-—the Vedas. 2: The Aryans 
move to the Ganges—caste—the brahinins. 5: 1 he 
Upanishads—the Over-Soul—transmigration—Nirvana 
—the growth of asceticism. 


JAINISM , 


1: Mahavira—his gospel. 2: How the gospel of Mahavira 
was corrupted—Jainism today. 


BUDDHISM 


1: The story of Gautama. 2: His gospel—its implica- 
tions—the Law of Karma. 3: How Gautama spread 
his gospel. 4: Early history of Buddhism—deification 
of Buddha—Asoka—the new Buddhism in China— 
Tibet—Japan—India—Ceylon. 


10 


PAGE 
75 


89 


100 


119 


129 


134 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
LATIN OTS Michie, We ddd te ee rb aa twit ch amet vate ye ve 1 () 


1: The dominant religion in India today—caste—the 
trinity—the divisiveness in Hinduism. 2: Vishnu—the 
avatars—the bhagavad-Gita—hK rishna—theology in 
Vishnuism. 3: Shiva—his popularity—the Tantra— 
sex in religion. 4: Hindu philosophy—yoga—the 
mystic ecstasy. 5: The religion of the lower classes. 


BOOK FOUR 
WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 
TRE CONPUCIANISIWc oe are stare ML Ak 169 


1: The primitive religion of China—ancestor-worship— 
the state cult—tthe popular religion—burial customs— 
family festivalk—-why did China advance so early? 2: 
The story of Confucius. 3: The work of Confucius— 


his gospel—his place in history. 4: The deification of 
Confucius. 


II. ‘“TAOISM ri tiaee 9 Beales tiga! Sa tic ME vel a Seana Ea Ore Be 
1: The life of Lao-Tze—the Tao-Teh-king—the gospel 
—was Lao-Tze a religious teacher? 2: The degeneration 


of Taoism—alchemy—gods and priests—the deification 
of Lao-Tze. 


Pils CDDEIGMio a caniatenla doch areneiia's Vuln ett: 5 LOT 
1: How it entered China—why it succeeded there—its 

rise and fall. 2: The Land of the “‘Three Truths’’— 
popular worship. 


BOOK FIVE 


WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 
I. ZOROASTRIANISM Sethe, Uhre Pipi ee Med 5: (19.9 


1: The animism of early Iran—did Zoroaster ever live? 
—the legends concerning his life. 2: The gospel of 
Zoroaster—Good vs. Evil—the fire-altars—the future 
life. 3: The ordeal of Zoroaster—his first converts— 
death. 4: The corruption of the gospel—ritual— 
burial customs—‘‘defilement’’—the priesthood—Mithra- 
ism. 5: The influence of Zoroastrianism on Judiasm— 
on Christianity—on Islam—the Parsees. 


11 





CONTENTS 


BOOK SIX 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 
PAGE 


Los) SJUDAISM ee ear er) Se ete en hs un ree 


1: The cradle of the Hebrew people—the lure of the 
Fertile Crescent—Egypt and the Exodus. 2: Moses— 
the covenant with Yahveh. 3: How the nature of 
Yahveh changed in Canaan. 4: The political history 
of the Hebrews. 5: The work of the prophets. 6: 
Amos—Hosea—Isaiah—-Micah—-Jeremiah—Yahveh be- 
comes God. 7: The spiritual exaltation of Israel—the 
Messianic Promise—its influence during the Babylonian 
Exile—Deutero-Isaiah. 8: The rise of the priests— 
their influence—the new prophets—the Destruction of 
Jerusalem—the Messianic Dream again. 9: The rise 
of the rabbis—the Wall of Law—Judaism today— 
Zionism—the goy-fearing people—Messianism, the 
heart of Judaism. 


BOOK SEVEN 
WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 


Tos JESUS Meee ete re LCN a Sree 


1: Palestine in the first century—the Zealots and saints. 
2: The childhood of Jesus—youth. 3: John the 
Baptist—Jesus begins to preach. 4: His heresies—his 
tone of authority—did Jesus think himself the Messiah? 
5: Jesus goes to Jerusalem—falls out of favor—is 
arrested, tried, and crucified. 6: The “‘resurrection’’— 
the disciples begin to preach. 7: The religion of the 
Nazarenes—the growing saga about Jesus. 


IT. CHRIST. oes) 5) oO ne 


1: The mysteries in the Roman Empire—the philosophies. 
2: The story of Saul of Tarsus. 3: The work of 
Paul. 4: Jesus becomes the Christ—the compromises 
with paganism—the superiority of Christianity—the 
writing of the Gospels—persecution by Rome. 5: Con- 
stantine and the triumph of Christianity. 6: The cost 
of success—the schisms. 7: The spread of Christianity 
—the ethical element in Christianity—how it sobered 
Europe. 8: The development of the Church— 
Protestantism—-why Christianity has succeeded. 


12 





CONTENTS 


BOOK EIGHT 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 
PAGE 


PAGES MIMEDANISM meen cecllae ici ier ath eebre: cae! B05 


1: The idolatrous religion of primitive Arabia—Mecca 
and the Kaaba. 2: The story of Mohammed—his 
gospel. 3: The preaching of the gospel to the Meccans. 
4: The preaching to the pilgrims. 5: The flight to 
Medina. 6: The Jews refuse to be converted—conflict 
with Mecca. 7: ‘The military character of Islam—the 
Holy War. 8: The character of Mohammed—his com- 

- promises—the pagan elements in Islam. 9: ‘The quali- 
ties in the religion. 


JEVEES (Stara 2) Saal Pl ei Ran Or TR i 9 
PEN CET Ce SUN Cy ium MINI AMC A eck pa 


13 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


JERUSALEM SLEEPS .... . tebe a 
MOUNTAINS THAT ROARED AND nue yee , 


WITH THOSE AMULETS THE SAVAGE Was NOT 
PER ALL MOM aceite wets einer ule op, 


THIS WAS THE FIRST CHURCH BUILT 

DEAD BODIES WERE TABOO 

AGRICULTURE WAS A MATTER OF RELIGION 

SE Frm) er eR Tee AON death go ee au 

THE GOD IN THE SKY SAW ALL . 

BON EIMENGE is cots cttw vel! Fount he 

RABY ONT AME Bub Te ites ve 5 hues Ye 

THE GREAT MOTHER GopDESsEs 

Pu PENT P Tc Vs tye vie 

PYRAMIDS BY THE NILE . 

ANCIENT GREECE .. . 

‘MEN FLED TO THE JUNGLES 

WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA Ary 

BUDDAH WAS SEATED BENEATH A BANYAN ‘TREE 

How BUDDHISM SPREAD 

BIVAMMIOe ay wk es 

IDOLS GROTESQUE BEYOND WORpS 

KING-FU-TZE ae AAS ott Oe 

A CONFUCIAN TEMPLE. Mt we 

A. “PROFESSOR OF TAOISM”’ . .. 

PRGHINESH=DUDDHA ). \.. .s 

REIMESE AL TAR’) so cis dle a Ve hey ek 4 

MORQAS TER SEEKSISALVATION (700) fe ie fel 

THE WANDERINGS OF ZOROASTER ... . 
15 





16 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


THE TURANIANS WERE BEDOUIN RAIDERS 


THE PROPHET OF IRAN 

THE AHRIMAN DRAGON .... 
HERE GO THE HEBREWS 

WHEE xXODUS as etree 


WHAT THE HEBREWS BUILT IN EGYPT 


IN THE WILDERNESS .. . 


THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE Bupines 


THE DIVIDED KINGDOM . .:. 
JEREMIAH? Si) ae Ore aie ene 
BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON . 
‘THE MAN FROM GALILEE. . . 
“THE PATH ‘OR’ JESUS!" Sie 
‘HE SAVIOR-GODS © ssi (eee 
SAULIOF, TARSUS) 0c. ee 
‘THE WANDERINGS OF PAUL . 
CHRISTIANITY IN110 A.D. . 
CHRISTIANITY AFTER CONSTANTINE 
A PRIESTESS OF BRIDGET . . . 


MOHAMMED WAS A LOWLY CAMEL Boy 


“PHECDDESERT adem c ins ov cca pine 


MOHAMMED SAT IN THE BAZAARS He fete ysis 


MOHAMMED RETURNS TO MECCA 
ON: THE *WAY*TO: MECCA 
"THE SHRINE OF A DESERT SAINT 


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PROLOGUE—JERUSALEM SUEEPS. 57.7. 


17 


PROLOGUE 


ROM afar, from over the hills 
—from another world it 
would seem—one hears the 
tinkling of camel bells. Faint- 
ly one hears the sound, very 
faintly: a cold, hesitant drip- 
drip of music falling in the 
Hien ee oave petot that 
there is silence, vast silence 
that fills each alley in the an- 

. cient town, that sinks deep 

into each hole and cranny, that rises high over the very 

top of the city wall. For Jerusalem sleeps. . . . The 
night is almost spent, and in the east the blue of the 
heavens has turned to that vivid gray-green presaging 
the dawn. But still Jerusalem sleeps . . . and there is 
silence . . . save for that low drip-drip of music from 

distant camel-bells. . . . 

And then of a sudden there is a cry—a strained, eerie, 
Arab cry. Like a hard-flung dirk its first note comes 
hurtling through the air, piercing one’s ear-drum and 
quivering there. From somewhere up above the flat- 
roofed houses, from the minaret high over some unseen 
mosque, it comes: a long, dragging, intermittent call let 
loose from lungs strained to bursting: 

.* 19 





eS 


20 PROLOGUE 





Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! 
So it comes, swooping through the heavens: 


‘Allah is greatest! Allah is greatest! 

I testify there is no God but Allah! 

I testify that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! 
Come to prayer! Come to salvation! 

Prayer is better than sleep! Prayer is better than sleep! 
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! 

Allah is greatest! Allah is greatest! 

There is no God but Allah!”’ 


And then it is no more. As suddenly as the cry began 
it ceases! . . . But Jerusalem sleeps no longer. “The 
first angry orange streak of day has just spilled over 
the crest of the Jordan hills; and in the town there be- 
gins a gathering confusion. Out of holes in the walls, 
out of the narrow doors of hovels, black and cold as 
caves, crawl phantom-like men and boys. Disheveled, 
they emerge from crevices in dark archways, from hidden 
stairways, from what look like catacombs. And@ slip- 
slop, slip-slop, their ill-shod feet go shuffling down the 
cobbled streets. . . . Here goes a man, lean and swart, 
in tasseled black head-shawl, brown Arab cloak, and 
sandals of worn camel-hide. There goes one, bearded, 
pale, and bent, in a broad fur shtretmel, plum velvet 
kaftan, and boots made for Russian snows. Over there 
goes a third, fat and crafty-eyed, in a rakish red fez, 
European suit, and American shoes that are new and 
squeaky. . . . Here comes a Carmelite monk, all brown 
and ursine, with a little brown cap over his tonsure; 
there goes a Greek priest, all black and bovine, his oiled 
locks tight in a top-knot. A little Anglican missionary, 





PROLOGUE 21 





his back-buttoned collar large enough to swallow his 
head, stumbles hurriedly down the steps of some hospice, 
A Yemenite Jew, shrunken, yellow, and still wet from 

“‘nail water,’’ sidles along as though fleeing a ghost. A 
filthy Arab beggar, his sore eyes already thick with flies, 
beats with his cane as he drags his naked feet over the 
stones. . . . And so they go, slip-slop, slip-slop ... 
more and more of them ... slip-slop, slip-slop ... 
a mad procession of hurrying phantoms in the half- 
light of the dawn. . . .. | 

To that muezzin who utters the call to prayer from 
the high minaret, they would seem like ants—if he 
could but see them. Like multi-colored ants they would 
seem as they swarm out of holes and from under arch- 
ways. But he cannot see them, for he is blind—as be- 
comes a muezzin. (A seeing man, if he were made 
muezzin, might see far too much from his lofty minaret: 
for instance, women in the privacy of their courtyards 
with their faces unveiled!) Could he but see them from 
his height, those men would look like so many insects 
scurrying about amid debris. . . 

_ But one who looks from no such tower, one who 
walks the earth to regard these creatures, can see that 
they are not at all insects. For there are lights in their 
eyes, darting gleams, whereof no insects in all creation 
could boast. ‘There are lights of hatred in those eyes, 
lights of hatred or dread or suspicion. It would seem 
that they feel as enemies to each other, these hundreds 
of creatures swarming in this ancient town. (Could 
mere ants feel as much?) .. . That Arab in his robe 
looks with loathing on the Armenian in his sack suit; 
and both look with disdain on the Jew in shtreimel and 











py ie) PROLOGUE 


kaftan. The Carmelite monk looks with anger at the 
Anglican missionary; and both look with contempt on 
the Greek priest. Hatred seems to be all around one: 
almost a noxious vapor that one can see, a veritable reek 
that one can smell. “These creatures seem unable to bear 
the very sight of each other. They actually seem ready 
to kill! 

They have killed in this ancient town, killed until 
every alley was flooded with blood. Nota wall in all this 
maze of walls but has rung with the groans of the dying. 
Skulls beyond counting have been cracked on these 
flags; throats unnumbered have been slit in these dark 
doorways. ‘They’ve murdered and pillaged and raped 
in this old holy town till now it is all but one Golgotha, 
one bloody Hill of Skulls. . . . And if you would 
know why, you need only look into the eyes of those 
hurrying phantoms. Readily they will tell you; ex- 
plicitly. Men have slaughtered and ravished in Jerusalem 
because they had—religion. Men have gouged eyes 
and ripped bellies because they—believed! ... Be- 
lieved in what? In God? ... Hardly. . . . No, they 
have believed only in mere vocables—Yahveh, Christ, or 
Allah: those vocables that are the fingers wherewith men 
try to point to God. 

Strange potency, this thing we call Religion! It has 
made men do barbarities quite beyond the reaches of 
credence. For it men have done foulnesses below the 
foulness done even by beasts. Yet for it also men 
have done benevolences such as transcend the benevo- 
lences of angels. If men have killed and died for religion, 
men have also lived for it. Not merely lived for it, but 
by it... . That cowering Yemenite Jew slinking in 


PROLOGUE 23 


the shadow of the archways sloughs off his terror and 
becomes a king when he enters his synagogue. His bent 
shoulders straighten, his sagging knees become firm, and 
the blessedness of peace lightens his eyes. . . . That 
blind Arab beggar, a mere frame of bones hung over 
with smelling rags, becomes a sultan when he stands at 
prayer in his mosque. He stands healed there of his 
ailments; he becomes a changed man with a vision reach- 
ing through his world to Paradise. . . . That dark- 
eyed Syrian girl, poor trull whose lips have caressed the 
flesh of twenty races, becomes clean once more when she 
kneels at the feet of the virgin. Strength floods into her 
tortured bones, healing comes to her flesh. Life, so long 
a hell of lust and lechery, becomes now wondrously 
clean and worthy. She feels saved—saved! 

Strange potency, this thing we call Religion! It came 
into man’s world untold centuries ago, and it is still 
in man’s world today. It is still there, deep and tre- 
mendous: a mighty draught for a mightier thirst, a vast 
richness to fill a vaster need. No matter where one turns 
in time or space, there it is inescapably. Wherever there 
is a man, there there seems to be also a spirit or a god; 
wherever there is human life, there there is also 
Patt Deets 

One wonders about it. What is it, this thing we call 
Religion? Whence did it come? And why? And 
how? ... What was it yesterday? What is it to- 
day?——And what will it become tomorrow? ... 


M’LON LAZARUS, JERUSALEM 
LAND OF ISRAEL 
July 2, 1925 










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wi Ae F nD itt 2 \ ; a . ; ‘ ) Ay, 
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Soe } : Le gr BS Sey ‘ tal ET eS = 
his 2 . 1) rs Te wt } : 7 “th, 








BOOK ONE 


HOW IT ALL BEGAN 
PoAaViACIC 


1: How the savage tried to explain the evils that befell him— 
he imagined all objects were animate—self-preservation and 
magic. 2: Religion and faith defined—the technique of magic 
—the dawn of the idea of the “‘spirit’—animism. 3: Man 
begins to think he can exploit the spirits—-shamanism—the 
charlatan in the early advance-of religion. 4: Fetishism. 
5: Idolatry—the beginning of sacrifice—of prayer—of the 
church. 6: Taboo. 


II. RELIGION 


1: The attempt to coerce the spirits gives way to the attempt 
to cajole them—but magic does not disappear—sacrifices. 2: 
The seasonal festivals—sex rites—the sacraments. 3: How 
the great gods were created. 4: How the ideas of sin, con- 
science, and future retribution arose—religion saves morality for 
a high price—prophet vs. priest. 5: How religion made society 
possible—and desirable—how it gave rise to art—the sig- 
nificance of Primitive Religon. 


BOOK ONE: 


HOW IT ALL BEGAN 
I. MAGIC 


N the beginning there was fear; 
and fear was in the heart of 
man; and fear controlled man. 
At every turn it whelmed 
over him, leaving him no mo- 
ment of ease. With the wild 
soughing of the wind it swept 
through him; with the crash- 
ing of the thunder and the 
growling of lurking beasts. 

« All the days of man were gray 
with fear, because all his universe seemed charged with 
danger. Earth and sea and sky were set against him; 
with relentless enmity, with inexplicable hate, they were 
bent on his destruction. At least, so primitive man 

concluded. . . . It was an inevitable conclusion under 
the circumstances, for all things seemed to be forever 
going against man. Boulders toppled and broke his 

bones; diseases ate his flesh; death seemed ever ready to 
lay him low. And he, poor gibbering half-ape nursing 
his wound in some draughty cave, could only tremble 
with fear. He could not give himself stoical courage 
with the thought that much of the evil that occurred 
might be accidental. He could not so much as conceive 
27 








28 THIS BELIEVING WORLD | 


of the accidental. No, so far as his poor dull pate could 
read the riddle, all things that occurred were full of 
meaning, were intentional. ‘The boulder that fell and 
crushed his shoulder had wanted to fall and crush it. Of 
course! . . . The spear of heaven-fire that had turned 
his squaw to cinders had consciously tried to do that 
very thing. Obviously! ... 

To the savage there was nothing absurd in the idea 
that everything around him bore him malice, for he had 
not yet discovered that some things were inanimate. In 
the world he saw about him, all objects were animate: 
sticks, stones, storms, and all else. He shied at each of 
them suspiciously, much as a horse shies suspiciously at 
bits of white paper by the roadside. And not merely 
were all things animate to the savage, but they were 
seething with emotions, too. “Things could be angry, 
and they could feel pleased; they could destroy him if 
they so willed, or they could let him alone. 

Perhaps, as Professor George Foot Moore slyly re- 
minds us, even civilized folk instinctively cling to that 
primitive notion. Children angrily kick the tables 
against which they bump their heads, as though those 
tables were human. Grown men mutter oaths at the 
rugs over which they stumble, for all the world as 
though those rugs had intentionally tried to trip them. 
And it may be that young and old still do such irrational 
things only because even today there still lingers in the 
mind of man the savage notion that all objects are ani- 
mate. When caught off his guard, man still is betrayed 
into trying to punish, either with a blow or with con- 
signment to hell-fire, the inanimate objects that happen 
to cause him pain. 








HOW IT ALL BEGAN © 29 


After all, civilized people at bottom are perilously 
close to the savage. Instinctively he too wanted to 
thrash whatever seemed to bring him evil. Only he was 
afraid. From experience he knew that fighting was use- 
less, that the enemy-objects, the falling boulders that 
maimed him, and the flooding streams that wrecked his 
hut, were in some uncanny way proof against his spears 
and arrows. That was why he was finally forced to 
resort to more subtle methods of attack. Since blows 
could not subdue the hostile rocks or streams, our an- 
cestor tried to subdue them with magic. He thought 
words might avail: strange syllables uttered in groans, 
or meaningless shouts accompanied by beating tom-toms. 
Or he tried wild dances. Or luck charms. If these 
spells failed, then he invented others; if those in turn 
failed, then he invented still others. Of one thing he 
seemed most stubbornly convinced: that some spell 
would work. Somehow the hostile things around him 
could be appeased or controlled, he believed: somehow 
death could be averted. Why he should have been so 
certain, no one can tell. It must have been his instinc- 
tive adjustment to the conditions of a world that was 
too much for him. Self-preservation must have forced 
him to that certainty, for without it self-preservation 
would have been impossible. Man had to have faith 
in himself, or die—and he would not die. 

So he had faith—and developed religion. 


2 


RELIGION is not all of faith, but only a part of it. 
By the word faith we mean that indispensable—and 
therefore imperishable—illusion in the heart of man 


30 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 








that, though he may seem a mere worm on the earth, 
he nevertheless can make himself the lord of the uni- 
verse. By the word religion, however, we mean one 
specialized technique by which man seeks to realize that 
illusion. It was by no means the first such technique to 
be invented by man; and it may not be the last, either. 
Long before man thought of religion, he tried to con- 
trol the “‘powers’’ of the universe by magic. When the 
“dawn man’ became sufficiently awake to be conscious 
of his life and of the innumerable hazards that 
threatened it, he did not first pause to examine those 
hazards; no, instead he first set out to avert them. He 
saw on every side of him the fell and bewildering 
“powers, and illogically (but naturally) his first con- 
cern was not how they worked but how they could be 
avoided. If he speculated about them at all, he prob- 
ably decided the very objects he saw had an animus 
against him—the actual storms and streams and preying 
beasts. Only later, much later, did he advance suf- 
ficiently to be able to think of those “‘powers’’ not as 
the objects themselves, but as invisible spirits inhabiting 
them. Primitive man was utterly unable to draw fine 
distinctions between soul and body, between spirit and 
matter. He merely knew trees that crushed him, caves 
that smothered him, mountains that roared and belched 
lava that destroyed him. “That was as far as his puny 
mind could carry him. 

But at last the day did come when, like the stealthy 
climb of a slow dawn, that idea of the spirit crept into 
man’s head. It came to him almost unavoidably. Of 
a morning he awoke, looked up bewilderedly at the 
familiar rocks of his cave, and gasped, “Hello, that’s 


HOW IT ALL BEGAN oh 





MOUNTAINS THAT ROARED AND BELCHED LAVA 


queer!’’—-or sounds to that effect. For there he was, 
just where he had been when he had stretched out and 
fallen asleep the night before—and yet he knew he had 
wandered very far from that place during the interim. 
He was quite certain of it! Very vividly he remembered 
fighting huge beasts during the night, or hurtling down 
ravines, or devouring whole mastodons, or flying. .. . 
And yet there he was, still lying in his smelly cave, 
for all the world as though he had never for a moment 
Je heh 2 eae a aa 

Of course, we civilized folk would explain the mystery 
by simply saying the fellow had had a dream. (Which 
is perhaps not so much of an explanation at that.) 
But he, poor savage, could not-even remotely guess at 
such an explanation. The idea of a dream was as for- 
eign to his mind as the idea of a monocle or a wardrobe- 
trunk. No, the only acceptable explanation he could 
offer himself was the obvious one that he was dual: 
that he possessed not merely a body but also a spirit, 
and that while his body had that night remained decently 








32 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 
at home, his spirit had gone a-roaming. . . . Why not? 

‘There were other experiences which that answer 
seemed to explain. [There was, for instance, death. 
Here was a body erect and vibrant one moment, and 
prostrate, inert, the next. What had happened to it? 
. . . Obviously the same answer fitted: its soul had fled. 

Just what was the soul and what the body, the 
savage could not be certain. He rather thought the soul 
might be the breath, since that always fled at death. 
(And that is why the Japanese word for soul used to 
be “‘wind-ball,’’ and the one for death, “‘breath-de- 
parture.”’ Similarly, that is why the Hindu word for 
soul it still atman, parent of the German word Ahtem, 
meaning “‘breath,’”’ and of the English word ‘‘atmos- 
phere.’’) But the savage had to imagine the soul might 
_also be something else than the breath, for he saw souls 
in unbreathing things, too. Indeed, he saw souls in all 
the things he came across. His whole world thronged 
with souls. 

Historians nowadays call that stage in the develop- 
ment of religion the ‘‘animistic,’’ from the Latin anima, 
meaning ‘‘spirit.’” “There are millions of savages in the 
world even today who still remain bogged in that 
animistic stage of religion. “They dwell in India and 
Africa and other far-away places, clinging there to a 
primitive faith which once must have been the faith of 
all human beings. 

3 

EVEN at the dawn of the animistic stage there could 
have been little in the heart of man save fear—and the 
hate born of fear. Only two kinds of spirits did the 
savage then seem to know: those that were neutral, and 


HOW IT ALL BEGAN 33 


therefore demanding no attention, and those that were 
hostile, and therefore to be driven away or circumvented. 
For instance, almost everywhere the ghosts of the dead 
were considered hostile. Because such ghosts were 
thought to hang like wraiths over the bodies they had 
once occupied, corpses were always put away with the 
most fearful and painstaking thoroughness. And after 
the burial the survivors usually tried to disguise or hide 
themselves so as to escape the ghosts. “They would paint 
themselves white (if they were black) or black (if they 
were white) ; and they would bar the doors of their huts 
or hide in caves. (That is why we still ‘““go into mourn- 
ing’ when a relative dies, putting on black garments and 
drawing down the blinds on the windows.) .. . 

Not for a long time, it seems, did man cease to assume 
that the active ‘““‘powers’’ were all unalterably hostile, and 
therefore to be driven away. Not until many centuries 
had passed did it occur to him that some spirits might 
really be friendly, or that even hostile spirits might in 
some way be won over and made friendly. But once 
that change did come, a complete revolution in the prac- 
tice of religion ensued. Instead of spending all his time 
inventing ways merely of driving the spirits away, man 
now began to try to bring some of them near. And 
therewith a new era opened in the history of the race. 
The first stirrings of confidence began to warm the 
blood of man, and slowly his cringing back began to 
straighten. Fear received its first decisive setback, and 
the promise of civilization drew its first breath. For 
then at last man dared to think he could actually 
exploit the spirits! ... 

Now there were two main ways in which man tried 


34 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


to exploit the power of a spirit. One was to conjure 
it into some individual, a medicine-man, or as he was 
called in primitive Siberia, a shaman. Originally the 
shaman was probably an epileptic, a person given to fits 
which could be explained only on the ground of “‘pos- 
session.’ [he shaman was esteemed to be “‘possessed’’ 
by a strange spirit, a formidable and perhaps violent 
spirit that could do things both foul and fair. So if a 
man had a fever he went to his tribal shaman, and the 
latter tried to drive it out by pitting his own “‘familiar 
spirit’’ against the fever-spirit in the patient. If he 
failed on the first attempt, he tried again, using a more 
elaborate ritual the second time. Perhaps he made the 
patient smear himself with excrement, or do some- 
thing else equally extraordinary. “Then he, the shaman, 
would go off into a fit in which he would dance madly, 
utter ghastly shrieks, beat fiercely on a tom-tom, or 
shake a horrid-sounding rattle. Perhaps he would 
carry on in that manner through a whole night, raving, 
dancing, and making faces, all to drive the bad spirit 
out of the patient. And the more elaborate he made 
the performance, the more wonderful and powerful he 
appeared in the eyes of the patient. Failure seemed 
altogether impossible after such efforts—and often was. 

But the shaman was not employed solely to drive out 
the evil spirits. More often, perhaps, he was employed 
to drive them into people. Because of the spirit that 
was supposed to be at his beck and call, the shaman was 
thought to be able to do evil as well as good, to send 
disease and defeat and death to one’s enemies, as well as 
bring relief and life to one’s friends. That was why the 
shaman usually became the tribal leader. The braves 











HOW IT ALL BEGAN 35 





stood in constant need of him, for without his “‘medi- 
cine,” without his spells and curses, they believed them- 
selves lost in war as well asin peace. He seemed the one 
effective instrument with which they could bludgeon the 
‘powers’ arrayed against them, the one valid means by 
which they could master the universe. So they clung 
to him with all their might and main, fearfully doing 
homage to him because of the magic power he was sup- 
posed to possess. 

Of course, the moment the falsity of a particular sha- 
man’s pretensions was definitely established, the poor 
fellow was never forgiven. The savages turned on him 
mercilessly and put him to death, perhaps with the most 
fantastic tortures. They had no use for medicine-men 
whose medicine didn’t work. . . . For that reasonit was 
only the conscious charlatans among the shamans who 
succeeded most and survived longest. The rest, the inno- 
cent ones who were fools enough really to believe that 
they could command the spirits, were easily exposed 
and soon snuffed out. “They were not shrewd enough 
to see the essential falsity of their own claims, and there- 
fore they were totally unable to keep others from seeing 
it. And, amazing as it may sound, that situation proved 
to be of vast benefit to mankind. As Sir James G. 
Frazer remarks in his great work, The Golden Bough, 
honest fools must have worked far more mischief 
in primitive society than clever knaves. Only the 
individual who was sufficiently superior to his fellow- 
men to be able to think of cheating them, was able 
at the same time to help them. Without any conscious 
desire on his part, the good resulting from such an in- 
dividual’s sagacity almost inevitably outweighed the evil 





36 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


accomplished by his guile. The emergence from the 
slime of primitive stupidity of a class of cunning shamans 
was therefore of genuine advantage to civilization. It 
took the direction of tribal affairs out of the hands of 
the old (whose only distinction was their age) and the 
strong (whose only distinction was their brawn) and 
put it in the hands of the shrewd and far-sighted. In- 
deed, the rise of shamanism was perhaps the most funda- 
mental factor in the whole development of early govern- 
Mens. s 


4 


BUT shamanism was only the less common of the two 
ways by which primitive man tried to exploit the spirits. 
The other, fetishism, was far more widespread because 
far more easily handled. “The word ‘‘fetishism’’ comes 
from the Portuguese feitico, meaning a saint’s medallion 
or relic worn as a good-luck charm. It is now the tech- 
nical term for the belief that an active spirit dwells in 
some particular object, and that the mere possession of 
the object brings with it the power to control its spirit. 
The first fetishes were probably pebbles with markings 
which happened to attract the eye of the savage because 
of their extraordinary color or shape. (Millions of 
people in the most civilized lands still believe in such 
“lucky stones.’’) Later on, however, fetishes were 
manufactured. Frequently they were little pouches con- 
taining objects with reputedly magic properties. ‘The 
hair of a lion was put in to give courage, a bit of human 
brain for cunning, an eyeball for keen vision, a tiger’s 
claw for ferocity, and so forth. “The savage gathered 
a whole collection of such fetishes on a string, and hung 








HOW IT ALL BEGAN 37 


them around his neck, or fastened them over the door 
of his hut. (Some scholars say our wearing of crosses 
around the neck, or fastening of horseshoes and mezu- 
zoth to the door, is but a survival of that savage fetish- 
ism.) With those amulets on his person, the savage 


SS 
Gy Gabel 
te 





WITH THOSE AMULETS THE SAVAGE WAS NOT AFRAID 


was no longer so afraid. He felt himself better able to 
fight off the hazards of life and imagined himself more 
of a match for the universe. When in need, he simply 
called on one of his fetishes for help; and if the help 
was not soon forthcoming, he angrily upbraided the 
thing for its laziness. If it still remained obdurate, he 
simply flung it away and got himself another. 

It took only a little while, of course, for the manu- 
facture of fetishes to become a sacred profession. Fos 


33) THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


one reason and another, certain individuals came to be 
looked on as the makers of the most potent fetishes. 
They made them not alone for the individual members, 
but also for the tribe as a whole. And thus it came to 
pass that even in lands where shamanism was unknown 
the professional holy man, the priest, made his advent. 
He was inescapable. ... 


5 


TRIBAL fetishes, like private ones, were originally 
natural objects: for instance, boulders of a peculiar color, 
or trees of a strange shape. “The Kaaba Stone, still 
worshipped by Moslems in Mecca, was originally just 
such a tribal fetish.) Later, however, even these tribal 
fetishes were also manufactured. “The boulder or tree- 
trunk was carved in some significant manner by the fetish 
maker, and became—an idol. It is impossible to say 
just where fetishism ends and where idolatry begins. The 
one grows into the other as the child grows into the 
youth. . 

Probably the idol was used in the beginning solely as 
a sort of scarecrow to drive the evil’spirits away. Later, 
however, it was so carved that it had a less fearsome 
appearance, and was used for other purposes. Even more 
than to scare the evil spirits away, it was used now to 
bring the good spirits near. The idol was smeared with 
blood or oil, in the hope that some good spirit might 
come and lick the redolent bait—and perhaps remain. 
And then periodically the smearings were renewed in 
order to hold the good spirit fast. Again and again they 
were renewed, until in time the practice became a fixed 
rite. After that, in the place of mere smearings of blood, 








HOW IT ALL BEGAN aia re ao 


whole carcasses were offered to the good spirit lodging in 
the idol. And thus sacrifice began. 

Food was brought, the rarest and richest obtainable, 
and the priest ceremoniously offered it to the spirit resi- 
dent in the idol. As to a dread chieftain, it was offered 
with many bowings and scrapings and ceremonial songs. 
And with many words of praise, too, for the spirit was 
thought to be vain as well as hungry. And thus prayer 
was born. 

In time a shelter was considered necessary for the idol: 
a cleft in a rock or a shady tree at first, and later a rude ° 
hut. And thus the first church was built. . . . 


< 


e 


t ya : 
Yk 
F a 3?*\ Ke 
| 
4 
e 


' 
‘ 
y 
i 
Y 
f. 





THIS WAS THE FIRST CHURCH BUILT 


It was all a most natural process of development. 
Once man took it into his head that in order to live he 
must master his universe, then animism, fetishism, idol- 
atry, priestcraft, sacrifice, prayer, and the church—all 





40 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


these were nigh inevitable. Primitive man, drowning in 
fear, clutched desperately at the spirits, as a man drown- 
ing in a stream might clutch at the reeds by the bank. 
Of course, one after the other the spirits failed him—even » 
as the reeds break in a drowning man’s hands. But still 
the savage continued to clutch at the spirits. It was 
almost instinctive with him. Hecould not helpit.... 


6 


BUT the savage by no means imagined it was safe 
to clutch at every reed by the side of his tarn of fear. 
On the contrary, most of them he considered highly 
dangerous, and he tried with almost panicky care to avoid 
them. ‘Those harmful spirits were what the savage in 
the Malay Archipelago still calls taboo, “‘marked.”” A 
sort of fiendish electricity was supposed to be in them, 
so that if one touched them they maimed or even killed. 

All sorts of objects and actions were considered taboo: 
some because they were so holy, and others because they 
were so demoniac. Usually the name of the god was 
taboo, and therefore it dared not be uttered save at cer- 
tain holy moments by officially holy men. (That primi- — 
tive superstition still has its finger on the lips of man, 
holding him from speaking God’s name in ordinary 
conversation.) ‘The flesh of certain holy or of certain 
particularly unholy animals was considered taboo, and 
therefore might not be eaten. (That primitive super- 
stition is responsible for the aversion to pork which 
marked the ancient Egyptians, and still marks the Jews 
and Moslems.) Marriage with a close relative, touching 
a corpse, killing one’s fellow-tribesman, wearing clothes 
of mixed wool and cotton, stealing a fellow-tribesman’s 





HOW IT ALL BEGAN 41 





DEAD BODIES WERE TABOO 


wife, kindling a fire on a holy day, cursing one’s own 
father, uncovering the head before an idol—all these 
acts and myriads of others, some of them socially crimi- 
nal, most of them socially meaningless—were in one 
religion or another considered taboo. Or their very op- 
posites were occasionally considered taboo. 

Certain taboos were temporary, as for instance the 
one branding a woman as contaminated for the length 
of the menstrual period. Others were permanent, as for 
instance the one outlawing a man guilty of accidentally 
killing a fellow-tribesman. In some cases, the tribes 
themselves were required to attend to the punishment 
of the transgressor; in others, punishment was supposed 
to be dealt in some magic way by the violated spirits 
directly. The transgression of certain taboos entailed 





42 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


disaster to every member of the tribe to which the trans- 
gressor belonged; in other instances punishment was con- 
fined to the transgressor alone. In some cases punish- 
ment could be evaded by elaborate penance and cleansing 
on the part of the transgressor; in other cases imme- 
diate death was inescapable. [he variants were innu- 
merabledin, 0. 

Even today most people are inhibited by taboos. 
Superstitiously they dread to do all sorts of meaningless 
little things. “They refuse to sit thirteen at a table, or 
walk under a ladder, or light three cigarettes with one 
match. ‘They are thrown into a panic if a mirror breaks 
in their house, or a black cat crosses their path; and they 
dread to tell of their own good health without “knock- 
ing on wood” or mumbling ‘‘Unbeschrieen.’’ Even 
people otherwise quite intelligent will sometimes be 
terrified by one or another of these stupid taboos. No 
wonder, therefore, if the savage suffered himself to be- 
come altogether taboo-ridden. Poor child that he was, 
his whole life settled down into an incessant and frantic 
struggle to keep away from all that was ‘‘marked.” . . 


II. RELIGION 


YEARS, centuries, millennia passed, and falteringly man 
and his thinking advanced. The savage changed his 
mode of life from that of a wild hunter roaming the 
jungles alone to that of a shepherd belonging to a tribe. 
And his risks changed accordingly. He had to worry 
now not simply about himself: in addition he had to 
think of his fellow-tribesmen, and of the herds off which 
he and his fellow-tribesmen lived. That meant an in- 
creasing interest in wells where the herds could be 








HOW IT ALL BEGAN 43 


watered, and in the sun, moon, and sky which seemed to 
control the rain. Thus a process of selection and elimina- 
tion set in among the spirits he worshipped. Some of 
them (for instance, the spirits of the sun and sky and 
desert springs) rose to a place of supreme importance, 
while others (such as the spirits of the arrow and the 
jungle tiger) fell into neglect and were in time even 
forgotten. 

‘That process was of course greatly accelerated once 
man made his next great change—from shepherd to 
farmer. It rendered his dependence on the elements com- 
plete, and the spirits dwelling in the elements perforce 
became his supreme deities. As a shepherd he had still 
been a little independent, for he had been able to move 
his flocks about to catch the rain. He could hardly do 
that now, however, for he had fields and not flocks any 
more. So he had to sit by and patiently wait for the 
rain to catch him. Or else he had to try to force the rain 
to catch him. 

In the beginning he did literally try to force the rain 
to come to him and his fields. With the aid of his sha- 
man or his fetishes he resorted to all sorts of magic prac- 
tices. But later, when he got it through his-head that 
not even with his shaman or fetishes could he unfail- 
ingly coerce the rain, he tried instead to cajole it into 
falling. And only when that happened did religion 
really begin. So long as man was still naive enough to 
believe that by the possession of some fetish or the utter- 
ance of some spell he could force the spirits to do his 
will, man had not yet advanced beyond unqualified faith 
in magic. Not until the sharp bludgeonings of repeated 
failure rendered him a meeker and wiser man, did he 


mi: THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


begin to put his faith in what may be strictly termed 
religion. Not until he had grown up sufficiently to 
suspect that some attempts at coercing the spirits were 
doomed inevitably to failure, did he begin to try to per- 
suade them instead. 

Of course, religion never displaced magic entirely. 
Man could never bring himself to surrender all his faith 
in the old technique, and to this day no historical religion 
on earth is without its adulterations of magic. In all 
of them there survive at least the relics of old coercive 
rites; and in all of them there exist originally persuasive 
prayers that have since taken on the character of coercive 
spells. “he belief, for instance, that the whole substance 
of a bit of bread and a cup of wine must change into the 
body and blood of Christ—that belief is quite flagrantly 
the relic of an old magic rite. Or the belief that any 
prayer is only efficacious if uttered in a certain place at 
a certain time in a certain tongue by a certain person, or 
is particularly efficacious if concluded with the words 
“We ask it in Jesus’ name’’ or some similar formula— 
such a belief reveals quite obviously the degeneration of 
a one-time religious petition into a mere magic spell. 

But though the technique of religion never managed 
entirely to supersede the technique of magic, it did suc- 
ceed in making it of secondary importance. As man’s 
wisdom increased, his over-assurance deserted him, and 
he resorted more and more to persuasion in his efforts to 
get the spirits to do as he desired. In time of drought 
he offered sacrifices of food and psalms of praise to the 
sun and moon and sky, or to whatever other spirits it 
seemed to him might exercise control over the water he 
needed. (In Egypt, for instance, the sacrifices were of- 





HOW IT ALL BEGAN 45 


fered to the spirit of the Nile, for it was altogether on 
the annual flooding of that river that the people de- 
pended for the watering of their lands.) But man of- 
fered them humbly. ‘The naively imperative tone was 
gone now. Man had grown up and had learnt that he 
could not get far with magic... . 

On the whole, man seemed to get along fairly well 
with the help supposed to come as a result of sacrifice. 
Of course, in unfavorable climates even sacrifices proved 
of no avail, and there man was of necessity compelled to 
remain a nomad. But wherever the climate was not too 
severe, and of fair regularity, sacrifices seemed to be ad- 
mirably potent. Nowhere, however, was the climate so 
mild and the soil so generous that man felt able to dis- 
pense with sacrifices entirely. Droughts occurred occa- 
sionally and crops failed, even in the most favorable 
regions. Asa result man never quite lost his dread of 
the tyrannical spirits, or his conviction that they had 
to be courted perennially. His confidence in their friend- 
ship was ever coupled with a lively fear of their fickle- 
ness. Indeed, his faith in them was no more secure than 
that of the pickpocket in the policeman he has just 
bribed. The primitive husbandman made no move 
without first casting a furtive glance to see if the 
“powers” were still well disposed toward him. He 
never quite got to feel that his hard toil alone was 
enough to make the earth yield its riches. No, he 
imagined the spirits unfailingly took a hand in the busi- 
ness, and he made no move to cultivate the soil without 
pausing first to cultivate them. Agriculture with him 
was more a matter of religion than of science. . . 





dit 


ate ba sive PX l ( wih 
oe 


* 
2 
ag 
i ey 
. ~~ 


Se Somiiae 





AGRICULTURE WAS A MATTER OF RELIGION 
2 


NOW, it was quite natural for man the farmer to be 
particularly concerned about the spirits at particular sea- 
sons in the year. Spring, when the seed was sown; 
summer, when the first fruits were gathered; and 
autumn, when the crops were harvested; these were 
periods of extraordinary religious importance. It was 
then that the primitive farmer felt he must make his 
mightiest efforts to persuade the “‘powers’’ to be good 
to him. And thus arose the seasonal festivals. 

The ritual on these festivals was at first almost un- 
printably lewd. ‘The savage imagined that the spirits 
brought forth the crops much as he himself brought 
forth children. And for fear the spirits might have for- 
gotten the process of reproduction, or be too bashful to 
initiate it, he himself went out into the fields and showed 
the way. Sexual license was therefore religious virtue 











HOW IT ALL BEGAN 47 


at most of the seasonal festivals. Either all the men and 
women went out into the open and lay together under 
the heavens, or in more advanced communities the priest 
and one or more virgins went into the temple and lay 
together before the idols. 

But the ritual on these festivals did not consist solely 
of sex orgies. Usually it included also sacrificial offer- 
ings, either human, animal, or cereal. At first these 
offerings were quite crude and direct. Sacrifices to the 
water-god were simply thrown into the streams, those 
to the earth-god were buried in the soil, while those to 
the sky-god were burned on altars so that the smoke 
might rise and tickle the nostrils of the heavenly one. 
But in the course of time, such simple practices were dis- 
covered to fail occasionally, and to remedy this, compli- 
cations were invented. ‘This sinew, let us say, was re- 
moved from the sacrificial carcass, or that organ was ex- 
posed; the blood was drained off and sprinkled on this 
or that side of the altar; prayers were recited at this 
or that stage in the ceremony. . . . So intricate, indeed, 
grew the etiquette to be used in approaching the gods, 
that in time it became impossible for the ordinary. man 
to master it. He had to call on a specialist in the ritual 
code, a professional sacrificer, to make his offerings for 
him. Just as men had earlier been forced to employ a 
shaman or a fetish-maker to perform their magic rites 
for them, so now they had to employ a priest to fulfill 
their religious duties. And thus priestcraft came into 
its fullest power. . . 

Much the same logic that led to seasonal festivals 
during the year led also to periodic ceremonies during the 
individual’s lifetime. It was felt that at birth something 








48 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


had to be done to win for the newcomer the favor of 
the deity, and to that end a sacrifice of one sort or 
another was usually offered. (It is possible that circum- 
cision, common in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, as well 
as in Semitic lands, was originally such a sacrifice.) 
Then at puberty, when sex proclivities first made them- 
selves markedly evident, it was felt that something more 
_ had to be done to ensure the 
& favor of the spirits. Elabo- 
y rate initiation ceremonies were 
t held, and the youths were 
j usually put through ghastly 
§ ordeals to prove them worthy 
both of membership in the 
tribe, and of protection from 
the tribal gods. (Confirma- 
f tion among the Christians, 
' and Bar Mitzvah among the 
BE Jews, are really survivals of 
f those old initiations.) Then 
at marriage it was thought 
f well to invoke the blessing of 
s the spirits. After all, marriage 
} had for its prime purpose 
we the bringing forth of children, 
| and it was believed that, un- 
less the spirits were properly 
placated to begin with, that 
prime purpose might be de- 
feated. (That is why some 
people still regard connubial 
life to be improper unless ritu- 








HOW IT ALL BEGAN 49 





ally consecrated by a minister or priest.) ... And 
finally at death it was believed dreadfully dangerous to 
give umbrage to the spirits. In many places burial rites 
became almost incredibly elaborate, giving rise—for in-. 
stance, in Egypt and China—to whole religious sys- 
Lersisey sone. 

And thus originated the sacraments. ... 


3 


FINALLY we come to the creation of the great gods. 
Just as the tribal chieftain in time became a king, so the 
tribal fetish in time became a god. It was a natural evo- 
lution. The wild spirit once thought to dwell in a tree 
or hill was first conjured into a portable fetish, so that 
the wandering tribesmen might enjoy its protection 
wherever they moved. (Readers of the Bible will re- 
member how the spirit of Jehovah—or more properly, 
Yahveh—dwelling in Mt. Sinai, was transferred to a 
portable ‘‘ark’’ which the primitive Hebrews carried 
with them on their wanderings.) Later on, when such 
shepherd wanderers settled down and became farmers, 
their nomad spirit sometimes settled down with them. 
(The old “‘ark’’ of the bedouin Hebrews was given a 
resting-place at last in the temple at Jerusalem.) This 
did not always occur, however, for the mortality rate 
among deities was exceedingly high during the transi- 
tion period from pastoral to agricultural life. And even 
the spirits that did manage to survive, came through 
completely altered in character. “Their functions thence- 
forth were new ones, and often their names were new, 
too. Only telltale little atavisms in the ritual remained 
to betray their nomadic origin. 


50 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


But even the lives of the deities surviving that great 
transition still remained precarious. Indeed, if any- 
thing, the mortality rate among them then increased. 
For now came greater changes than ever before occurred 
among men, and consequently greater changes had to 
occur among the gods. ‘Tribes fused. “The task of re- 
sisting invasion, or of building irrigation dams, com- 
pelled many clans to merge, and their customs, myths, 
and gods had to merge, too. Gods appeared on the scene 
who were obviously composites, with composite names 
and composite rituals. And as the population increased, 
and certain villages grew to be towns, city-states, nations, 
and finally empires, the jurisdiction of these composite 
gods grew also. [hey began to gobble up the little 
gods of the tributary lands, and thus in time became the 
almost undisputed lords of millions of worshippers. 

Many centuries still had to run their course before 
anyone could imagine a deity who was the One God 
of the Universe. Men still continued to be polytheists, 
believing in many gods. They might pay homage only 
to one, the god of their own particular tribe. They 
might consider him the mightiest god of all and picture 
him as did the Hindus in their grotesque idols, as having 
arms that reached everywhere and eyes that saw all. But 
they never denied the existence of other gods sustaining 
similar relations to other tribes. 

Significantly, however, even the mightiest god could 
not strike so much terror in the heart of civilized man 
as the rudest idol did in the heart of the savage. Time 
had dealt hard with fear. Man was still far from able 
to control his universe, but at least he showed signs of 
beginning to cope with it. And asa result the ‘‘powers’’ 





HOW WT ALL BEGAN ai 


of the universe became less terrifying. Man began to 
say they were his allies and partners, and if he exalted 
them extravagantly he did so largely in order to exalt 
himself. The gods of the nations became simply the 
divine leaders of the nations, the heavenly kings. ... 


4 


THE idea that the gods were heavenly kings had at 
least one implication of tremendousimportance. Earthly 
kings were naturally expected to see to the enforcement 
of the laws of the nation. It was their task to see to 
it that crime was detected and that criminals were pun- 
ished. But always certain crimes occurred that could 
not be detected, just as ever and again some criminals 
escaped without punishment. Particularly was this so 
in the newly swollen cities, where policing in the form 
of neighborly prying was no longer possible. In those 
new capitals, with their milling, thronging, turbulent 
populations, morality seemed to have no chance. ‘The 
taboos which had been strictly kept in the compact little 
clan came to be transgressed in the cities almost with 
impunity. For a while the breakdown of society seemed 
inevitable. 

But the idea that the gods were heavenly kings saved 
the day. By the logic of analogy it was reasoned that 
as earthly kings punished crime that was detectable, so 
heavenly kings punished that which was undetectable. 
So there really was no chance of avoiding justice ulti- 
mately. Neither might nor cunning was of any avail, 
for even though one escaped the judgment of the earthly 
king, there was another, the inevitable and inexorable 
judgment of the god, still to face. The god in the sky 


Tesi 


Ky Mion Ay) Py 
ve ne 





THE GOD IN THE SKY SAW ALL 
52 








POW Ie AL BEGAN. 53 


saw all and knew all. Nota taboo or a law existed but 
he was concerned with its enforcement. (Indeed, he 
was the actual author of all taboos and laws-—at least, 
so it was soon said.) So there was no chance for the 
transgressor—he could never escape. 

And thus was born the idea of sin. Crime, which 
was really an offense against society, came to be thought 
of principally as a sin against the god. And _ because 
often no one could put his finger on the punishment 
visited upon the offender by the god, the idea of the 
conscience arose. ‘Ihe god, it came to be believed, pun- 
ished the wicked in secret ways, sending evil spirits into 
them to gnaw at their souls and give them no rest. 
And when it was seen that many of the wicked seemed 
quite untroubled by evil consciences, quite unperturbed 
by secret punishments, then the idea of future suffering 
was advanced. It was claimed that, even though some 
of the wicked went scot free in this world, in the next 
they would not be nearly so fortunate. No, indeed! 
After death they would get even more than their just 
due, roasting in flames—according to the dwellers in 
torrid lands—or freezing in ice-floes—according to the 
inhabitants of arctic regions. 

The actual course of development out of which were 
evolved these ideas of sin, conscience, and post-mortem 
retribution, was, to be sure, not nearly so simple as is 
made out here. For centuries man fumbled about to 
lay hold of these ideas, blundering off into the most 
pathetic errors, and beating his way back only with the 
horridest pain. But finally the great task was accom- 
plished, and morality, at the cost of being religionized, 
was preserved. 





54 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


It was no small price to pay. Religion proved in 
time rather too effective a preservative. It sheltered too 
extensively and indiscriminately, keeping alive not 
merely the morals necessary to the life of society, but 
also every scrap of ancient ritual and savage taboo. 
Religion developed a tendency to hold on to everything 
with equal tenacity, allowing for no difference between 
the slightest rite and the gravest law. Or if it did admit 
any difference, its verdict was usually in favor of the 
rite. Priestly teachers were inclined to tell the people 
that ritual, the proper treatment to be accorded the 
gods, was decidedly more important than ethics, the 
proper treatment to be accorded to mere men. What 
was more injurious, they often taught that all offenses, 
both against rite and right, could be atoned for in but 
one way: by sacrifice. Justice, they declared, could al- 
ways be tempered, and the guilty might perhaps even 
go scot-free, if only enough rams and fatlings were 
offered the heavenly judge. . . 

That teaching, naturally enough, proved in time a 
gigantic obstacle in the path of civilization. Indeed, 
the whole career of religion among civilized folk is in 
a measure the story of the struggle to remove that ob- 
stacle. In essence it is the story of prophet warring on 
priest; of him who would moralize religion wrestling 
with him who had ritualized morals... . 


5 


BUT though religion may have exacted a high price 
for its saving of morality, still—it did save it. That 
is something many people are inclined to forget. They 
are accustomed to dwell only on the evils, on the 





HOW IT ALL BEGAN D1, 


thwartings and frustrations, which certain forms of re- 
ligion in later days brought upon civilization. But it 
is well to remember that, had it not been for religion 
and its underlying faith that the universe and its fell 
“powers” could be controlled, there would not have 
been any civilization to frustrate. Civilization is but 
another name for man’s increasing victory over fear— 
and the first phases of that victory were attained almost 
solely through religion. Religion was the boot-strap 
by which man raised himself out of savagery. Or, to 
return to a metaphor we have already used, it was the 
bank of reeds to which man clung as often as the dark 
waters of fear threatened to flood over him. In a very 
real sense it was his salvation. . 

It was the salvation of society, too. Not merely did 
religion make it possible for one man to live by him- 
self, but even more did it make it possible for two men 
to live together. Even the beginnings of society would 
have been rendered impossible by man’s innate fear 
simply of the dead—let alone of the living—nhad re- 
ligion not come into high standing in the world. At 
the sight of death, the natural reaction of the savage 
was flight. Instinctively he wanted to burn the whole 
village in which the corpse lay, and run! And at first 
probably he did follow that instinct, and for centuries 
no camp ever lasted more than a few weeks or months. 
. . . But then was born the idea of burial rites to 
placate the spirits of the dead, religious rites that firmly 
rooted the survivors to the place where the dead were 
buried. Religion found a way to rob death of a little 
of its ghastly frightfulness. Villages were now actually 
created around graves, instead of being burnt down over 





56 HIS BELIEVING WORLD 


them. Man, once so terrified by the ghosts that he fled 
at the least suspicion of their presence, now dared to 
go right up to them and implore their aid. Ancestor- 
worship arose. Tribes often depended for their 
solidarity upon the sole bond of supposed descent from 
a common ancestor. Failing that, the tie that served to 
hold them together was a common ritual. Ceremonies 
at birth, puberty, marriage, and death were the things 
that bound those clansmen into a compact group. ‘The 
same was true of the annual festivals. And thus, by 
and with religion, the living together of men was made 
possiblesyaias 

More than that: by and with religion the living to- 
gether of men was made not merely possible, but also 
desirable. Religion clothed and adorned the cold 
nakedness of primitive existence with shreds and patches 
of beauty. All that grace and color which transmutes 
mere existence into Life—in a word, all Art—may truly 
be said to have arisen out of religion. Sculpture had 
its origin in idol-making, architecture in temple-build- 
ing, poetry in prayer-writing, music in psalm-singing, 
drama in legend-telling, and dancing in the seasonal wor- 
ship of the gods... . 

It may seem to us incredibly rude, this conglomeration 
of terrors and hopes, of clutchings and gropings, of 
stupidities and yearnings, which for want of a better 
name we call Primitive Religion. But for all that it 
was holy—for it saved mankind... . 


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BOOK TWO 


HOW RELIGION DEVELOPED IN 
THE ANCIENT WORLD 


THE CELTS 


1: The primitive gods—Druids—the mistletoe cult. 2: The 
festivals—the great holocausts—Beltane—Lugnasad—Samhain 
—ghost worship. 


THE BABYLONIANS 


1: The Semitic goddesses—how the Babylonian gods arose 
—trinities. 2: Ishtar and the sex rites—holy prostitution— 
astrology. 3: The priesthood—its vices—and virtues. 4: 
The defects of the religion—-polydemonism—a ritualized 
morality—Shabatum and mythology—contrast with Hebrew 
versions of same—fear. 


THE EGYPTIANS 


1: Original animal-worship—the growth of the gods—the 
priests. 2: The idea of monotheism emerges. 3: The reforma- 
tion under Ikhnaton—reaction 4: The religion of the masses— 
Osiris—the future life—why the pyramids were built. 5: The 
dead—the Judgment Day—the resort to magic. 


THE GREEKS 


1: The Minoan religion—how the Greek gods arose—the 
Olympian cult. 2: The Olympian cult fails—the learned take 
to philosophy. 3: The masses take to magic—and the 
““mysteries’’-—the savior-god idea—how men tried to become 
divine. 4: The desire for a future life—and how the mysteries 
satisfied it. 


THE ROMANS 


1: Original worship of household spirits—the state religion 
arises—and is intensified. 2: Why the state religion failed—the 
coming of the mysteries—Cybele—Attis—the other foreign 
cults. 3: Augustus restores the state religion—the god- 
emperor—the re-action—the Cynics. 4: Why decadent Rome 
took to the mysteries—Mithras—its significance. 5: Conclu- 
sion—Why these ancient cults cannot be called ‘‘dead’’—the 
significance of their other-worldly appeal. 


48 


BOOK TWO 


HOW RELIGION DEVELOPED IN 
THE ANCIENT WORLD 


HE story of how religion began 
has been made unconscionably 
short and simple in the book 
just closed. Fundamental ele- 
ments have been treated in the 
sketchiest fashion, and many 
significant elements have hardly 
been touched on. But in so 
small a book it was impossible 
to do otherwise. To have gone 
into primitive religion with any 

thoroughness, to have given even in outline the myriad 
variants among the races of each belief and practice, 
would have required not a score of pages, but a whole 
shelf of heavy tomes. All that was possible here was 
an outline of the central plot, a hurried sketch of the 
main line of march followed by religion as it advanced 
through prehistoric centuries. 

Unhappily, that outline reads as though given with 
complete assurance. Despite all the ‘“‘perhapses’’ and 
“‘probablys’’ scattered throughout the story, it still reads 
as though the writer knew for certain just what had 
happened. Actually he knows nothing of the sort. All 
he knows is what many learned anthropologists, after 
much painstaking research, have surmised to be the truth. 
72 











60 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





Of course they may have surmised quite badly. ‘Their 
underlying theory may be entirely wrong, and religion, 
instead of having been originally created to elude or 
conquer fear, may have arisen quite independently of 
it. Religion may be an altogether primal instinct in 
the human race—something just as old and fundamental 
and innate as fear itself. Who knows? ... 

‘To go into that question, however, would serve only 
to add confusion to what is already too confused a story. 
Many sets of guesses have been made as to how religion 
began, but in this little book there was room for only 
one of them—the one that seems (to the writer) the most 
reasonable. And that having been given, we must 
QUEEVROTL eer 

Happily for us the development of religion is not 
nearly so veiled in mists of doubt as is its beginning. 
Fairly detailed accounts of many ancient cults exist, and 
from these we can plot out an almost clear line of pro- 
gression. Beginning with the animism of the barbaric 
Celts, and continuing clear through to the Mysteries 
of the last of the Romans, we can follow almost step 
by step the slow march of early religion. 


1. THEGGEEDS 


THERE is no particular reason for beginning our 
study of ancient religion with the Celts save that records 
of their rites and beliefs have come down to us with 
comparative fullness. Iwo thousand years ago the 
Celts were but one of a horde of Aryan peoples just 
come up out of the night of savagery into that fitful 
fore-dawn which we call barbarism. Their religion, 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 61 


therefore, was still no more than a pathetic gesture that 
wavered between the brave but foolish clawing of the 
savage and the meek but hopeful reaching-out of civi- 
lized man. It was not altogether a dependence on magic 
rites, for the Celts had already discovered that magic 
alone was not enough. ‘They were already sufficiently 
advanced to have learnt that the ‘‘powers’’ controlling 
the universe, the spirits supposed to dwell in trees and 
stones and other natural objects, could often be moved 
far more effectively by petition than coercion. Yet 
they did not stake all their faith on petition, either. 
Their priests were still covertly shamans, and their 
sacrifices were at least implicitly half-coercive spells. 
Perhaps the word “‘cajolery’’ best describes the technique 
wherewith the Celts sought to win over their deities. 

They had many deities to win over, for every natural 
object of any impressiveness seemed to them to contain 
a spirit to be conjured with. And certain of these spirits 
had already been sufficiently detached from their physical 
bodies to be thought of as remote gods and goddesses. 
Names had been given to them—-Ogmius, Maponus, 
Bridget, and the like—and whole mythologies had been 
spun around them. A sacrificial ritual had grown up, 
and a priestly class had been established. There seem 
to have been no temple edifices, however, but only un- 
roofed circles of stone pillars—Stonehenge in England is 
the ruins of one of these circles—and groves of sacred 
trees. Within these circles and groves the priests (who 
were called Druids, ‘‘Wise Ones’’) offered un sacrifices 
and cast spells at regular times, and the priestesses—of 
whom there seem to have been not a few—performed 
rites of decidedly dubious respectability, 


62 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


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STONEHENGE 


Idolatry had not advanced far among the Celts, and 
their images of the gods were rudely carved logs or 
simply weapons of one sort or another. Their chief 
ceremonial object was the mistletoe, that white-berried 
creeper which has captured the imagination of primitive 
peoples all over the world. Sir James G. Frazer, in that 
most fascinating book in all the literature of compara- 
tive religions, The Golden Bough, has tried to give the 
reason for the peculiar veneration attached to this plant. 
He maintains it is because the mistletoe has no roots in 
the polluted earth but seems to grow magically between 
heaven and earth. By that sorry clutching at conclu- 
sions which is all that primitive man has of logic, this 
plant, dangling down from the sky, is therefore thought 
to be endowed with magic properties. Wherever the 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 63 
Druids discovered it growing on an oak tree, they would 
approach with great awe and ceremonial pomp and cut 
it down with a golden sickle. “They would be dread- 
fully careful to catch it before it fell to the earth, and 
then they would use it to make a potion for the fer- 
tilizing of barren women and cattle, and for the cure 


of epilepsy, ulcers, poisoning, and almost every other 
human ailment. 


ye 


REGULAR festivals were held three times in each year, 
and with especial elaborateness once in every five years. 
They were largely fire festivals, and were directly in- 
tended to make the spirits fertilize the soil. Julius 
Caesar has bequeathed to us our earliest description of 
those gruesome quinquennial festivals, when scores of 
criminals—that is, persons who had transgressed taboos 
—and prisoners of war and animals would be herded 
into colossal images of wicker-work, and then cere- 
moniously burnt to death. It was imagined that the 
greater the number of victims, the greater would be the 
fertility of the land, and once all northern Europe 
reeked with the smell of such holocausts. Originally the 
ordinary annual festivals were also bloody scenes of 
human sacrifice; but by historic times they had been 
rid of that savage factor. But fire still played a large 
part in the conduct of those festivals, and their obvious 
purpose was still the magic fructifying of the land. 
On the eve of the first of May, when the Celts held 
their festival of Beltane, bonfires of oak-wood were 
lighted under sacred trees or poles. A ‘“‘king’’ and 
‘“‘“gueen’’ were chosen to lead the processions into the 








64 THIS BELIEVING WORLD _ 


fields, and then for hours there was a mad flaring of 
brands plucked from the bonfires, and a wild swirling 
and dancing in orgiastic revelry. Men and women lay 
together in the fields, and behaved as did all] other primi- 
tive peoples at their religious festivals. Simple barbarians 
they were, and they did what they did in all good faith 
that it would suggest to the sun and the other gods 
what they in turn ought to do: make things grow. Not 
until the Christian idea of morality was brought to them 
did the Celts grow conscious of any wickedness in their 
old rites. And even then they did not give them up at 
once. Indeed, to this day their descendants have not 
given them up entirely. “They have merely pruned and 
refined and Christianized them into the eminently re- 
spectable—but reminiscently very naughty—Maypole 
dances of modern times. ... 

The two other Celtic festivals of the year were Lug- 
nasad held on the first of August, and Samhain held on 
the last day of October. Both were marked by rites 
rather like those of Beltane, and both have persisted to 
our time, the one as Midsummer Night and St. John’s 
Day and the other as Hallowe'en and All Saints’ Day. 
Samhain was the more important of the two, for even as 
in the Christian calendar it was regarded as the day when 
the souls of the dead foregathered with the living. Food 
was laid out in the huts of the Celts and cheery fires 
were lighted on the hearths, so that the shivering hungry 
shades of the dead might prepare themselves against the 
wintry months just coming to the world. 

The Celts were inordinately interested in the dead. 
They knew little about another world save that there 
was somewhere in the Western Sea a “‘sweet and blessed 





RELIGION IN 





THE ANCIENT WORED 765 
isle’ reserved for heroes and demigods; but nevertheless 
they cherished an abiding faith in an afterlife even for 
the lowliest tribesman. Nervously they imagined the 
dead to be shades that hovered in the gloaming, in- 
tangible wraiths that yet could do great hurt or kind- 
ness. Perhaps their great fire-festivals, those ghastly 
holocausts of men and beasts, were but desperate efforts 
to drive away the more malevolent of the shades. For 
those poor Celts, forever harried by storm and drought 
and pestilence, had brought themselves to believe that 
the dead were, in part at least, the doers of all mischief. 
The dead and the spirits of nature together seemed the 
ultimate masters of the universe, and all of life for the 
living seemed to depend on their mysterious favor. That 
was why religious rites played so large a part in Celtic 
thought and conduct. “They were primitive rites, crude, 
blundering, almost absurdly naive—but they had to be 
kept up. Even as a sick man, though he may reject 
one medicine after another, never can quite bring him- 
self to reject physicians entirely, so the ancient Gaul 
and Briton often forsook one spell for another, but 
never dared to forsake the Druids. “They were afraid 
re attald,.:.. 


Il. THE BABYLONIANS 


TO trace the further advance of religion we must 
now shift the scene to a land far distant from the 
primeval forests of the Celts. We must go to ancient 
Mesopotamia, that verdant region between the great 
rivers of the Near East, where dawn had already broken 
what-time night still reigned in the West. ‘The religion 
of Babylonia, even though far more ancient than that 





66 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


of the Celts, was in almost every respect far more ad- 
vanced. From long before the beginning of recorded 
history, religion seems to have been further advanced 
in the East than in the West. For reasons which we 
cannot at all make out, the Orientals, especially the 
Semites, seem to have had a peculiar genius for religion. 
They were bedouins, those Semites: a lean, hungry, 
harried race forever roaming the desert vastnesses of 
Arabia in search of another place and another time to 
die. And it was they, most probably, who laid the 
foundations of Babylonia’s religion. Thousands of 
years ago, when some of them struggled out of the bar- 
ren desert and obtained a foothold in the lush meadows 
of Mesopotamia, they brought with them their old desert 
religion. It was then little more than a crude animism, 


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RELIGION IN GUHE: ANCIENT! WORLD) 67 


with Ishtar, “Self Waterer,’”’ the spirit of the oasis, as 
the chief deity. Ishtar, who was a goddess, probably 
had the spirits of the wind and sun and moon as hus- 
bands: and certainly she had Tammuz, the spirit of the 
date-palm, as her lover. We cannot be certain, but it 
seems rather likely that most of the other important 
deities then were also goddesses. “This must have been 
because the primitive Semites were still in the matriarchal 
stage of pre-civilization. Wherever the heads of their 
families and clans were the mothers, not the fathers, 
quite naturally the chief spirits were imagined to be 
goddesses, not gods. 

But once the invaders from the desert came to feel 
at home in verdant Mesopotamia, and began to mingle 
more or less freely with the non-Semitic natives, their 
religion took on a quite altered aspect. “The matriarchal 
form of society gave way to the patriarchal, and as a 
natural consequence the goddesses were changed to gods. 
The chief deities chosen for the newly created cities 
were usually masculine. Sometimes they still retained 
the feminine names by which they had been known in 
earlier days, as is seen in the case of Ningirsu, literally 
“Lady of Girsu,’’ who was the very masculine god of 
the city of Lagash. Or if the deities managed to persist 
in the new social order as females in fact as well as name, 
they took on altogether new functions. A population 
no longer living in the desert, for instance, had no longer 
any reason to worship the spirit of the desert oasis— 
so a star instead of an oasis was given to Ishtar as a 
Bomewec.. . 

But the Babylonians by no means contented them- 
selves with merely remodeling the old gods. They 


68 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


manufactured new ones, too—hundreds of them. Even 
to list the chief of them—Ningirsu, Bel, Shamash, 
Nabu, Marduk, Anu, Ea, Sin, and the rest—would be 
quite tiresome. ‘The idea of one great god with uni- 
versal sway seems hardly to have occurred to the people. 
Again and again, as one city after another became domi- 
nant in the empire, one god after another became chief 
in the pantheon. For instance, so long as Babylon was 
the capital of the empire, Bel-Marduk, the god of 
Babylon, was considered the superior deity. But never 
more than superior: never One alone, and beyond chal- 
lenge. Occasionally not a single god, but a group of 
three together was worshipped as superior: Anu (sky), 
Bel (earth), and Ea (sea); or Shamash (sun), Sin 
(moon), and Ishtar (the star Venus). . .. Age after 
age new trinities of that sort arose. 


2 


BUT from beginning to end, one deity remained su- 
premely popular at least among the plain people of 
Mesopotamia. That deity was Ishtar, the great mother 
of the gods, the spirit of sex and fertility, the very prin- 
ciple of life itself. Many other early peoples worshipped 
some such mother goddess, for the power of reproduc- 
tion among plants, beasts, and men, remained unflag- 
gingly the most vital and engrossing power of all. To 
be able to control it meant to live; to fail meant to die. 
Little wonder, therefore, if everywhere in the world, in 
Mexico and the Congo, in Ireland and the Malay isles, 
we find the people groveling at the feet of some sex- 
dealing, life-breeding spirit. 

In Babylonia and throughout the Levant the people 








RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 69 





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THE GREAT MOTHER GODDESSES 


seem to have bowed down to it inordinately, and sex 
rites in honor of Ishtar—or Astarte, Ashtoreth, Isis, 
Cybele, Venus, and Aphrodite, as the goddess was 
known in the various lands—were counted of primary 
importance. In Babylonia itself it was required that 
every woman, rich or poor, should submit at least once 
in her life to the embraces of a stranger. She had to 
wait in the courts of a temple of Ishtar until some man 
bought her for an hour, and then she had to dedicate to 
the goddess the wages earned by her harlotry. With- 
out performing that rite a woman was imagined to 
be incapable of bearing children, and was therefore un- 
fitto marry. Asa result, the temple-courts were simply 
choked with desperate virgins; and the priests of the 
Ishtar cult, who often were paid to play the part of 
the welcome stranger, grew enormously rich... . 


70 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


The difference between this Babylonian cult of Ishtar 
and the primitive Celtic cult of Bridget was entirely one 
of degree, not of kind. Both were inspired by dread of 
the same evil, sterility; and both sought to attain one 
end, fecundity. But one, the Babylonian, was far less 
primitive than the other—far less wildly promiscuous 
and bestial. —IThe Babylonian rites were conducted within 
the confines of stone temples, not out in the furroughs 
of the torch-lit fields; and they were hedged in with 
a thousand rules and watched over by a myriad of priests. 
Between those priests and the Celtic Druids there was 
again a difference only of degree. “The Babylonian holy 
men were merely shamans of a more advanced type. 
They still were little more than magicians and medicine- 
men; but they had evolved a highly intricate technique, 
and had developed a grotesque psuedo-science to support 
it. They had somehow hit on the idea that the con- 
stant changes in the heavens bear some subtle relation 
to the happenings here on earth. Not merely to the 
vast geographic happenings on earth (that much would 
be scientifically quite valid), but even more to the petty 
fortunes of all the creatures swarming over it. All 
human souls were believed to be hitched for weal or 
woe to stars, and the chief concern of the priests was, 
therefore, star-gazing. That sorry deceit called as- 
trology, which still lures the feebler-minded among men, 
had its first development back there in Babylonia almost 
four thousand years agol 


3 


BUT the Babylonian priesthood did not confine its 
interests to the stars in the heavens. On the contrary, 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 71 


it also reached out and tried to control the most mundane 
things on earth. It truckled to the conceits of the rich 
and preyed on the terrors of the poor. It owned mag- 
nificent and costly brick temples that rose to the very 
heavens in ornate terraces—veritable Towers of Babel 
they were—and regularly sacrificed to the idols that 
stood in them. “There were many divisions in the priest- 
hood, each with its own particular function. Certain 
of the clerics awoke the gods in the morning, washed 
and dressed them, and offered the elaborate sacrifices; 
others sang the hymns and chanted the spells; to others 
was assigned the task of fructifying the barren women 
who waited in the temple courts; still others read horo- 
scopes and told fortunes. That many of the priests 
were fools and more were knaves, is to be taken for 
granted. “That many gouged the widows and forgot 
the orphans, is to be expected. After all, religion to the 
Babylonian was not a matter of noble sentiment, but a 
sort of complicated insurance business; and its priestly 
solicitors and agents were, as Americans would say, out 
to get “‘all there was in it for them.’’ ‘Their extortions, 
especially for fortune-telling, sometimes grew so flagrant 
that kings had actually to pass laws to control them. 
Inscriptions tell us that already before 2800 B. c. King 
Urkagina had to legislate against priestly profiteer- 
ingle 4. 

But it must not be imagined for a moment that the 
great priesthood of Babylonia was unrelievedly lecher- 
ous and low. One cannot read their ancient hymns 
without realizing that at least some among their band 
were men of what we vaguely call “‘spirituality’’ and 
“religious insight.”” Most of those hymns are mere med- 


72 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


leys of magic phrases, but others are poems of amazing 
beauty. Indeed, certain of them ring with tones that 
are strikingly reminiscent of the Hebrew Psalms. For 
instance: 


The sin which I sinned I knew not; 

My God has visited me in wrath. 

I sought help, but none took my hand; 

I wept, but none gave ear. 

To my God, the merciful God, I turn and pray; 
How long, O Lord! ... 

O God, cast not away thy servant, 

But turn my sin into a blessing. 

May the wind carry away my transgressions. 
Seven times seven are they— 

Forgive thou them! ... 


Now that is no ordinary bit of primitive liturgy. 
It reveals a reverence for the deity, a humility in the 
worshipper, and above all a freedom from magical for- 
mula that would lead us to think it all a forgery did 
we not have the very stone on which the Babylonian 
priests engraved it. Such lines may not be even re- 
motely typical, but they are authentic. And because 
they are authentic, and they and other lines of like 
quality were ever written in Bel-Marduk’s courts, the 
cult of Babylonia must be seen to mark a distinct ad- 
vance in the evolution of religion. 


4 


BUT we must not exaggerate the extent of that ad- 
vance. Babylonia’s cult was distinguished for the in- 
tricacy of its priestly organization, the ornateness of its 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 73 





temple ritual, and most especially for the elaborateness 
of its astrology. In other words, it was distinguished 
for its legal, aesthetic, and psuedo-scientific features. 
But in the highest concerns of religion, in theology and 
ethics, it was still woefully primitive. Somehow it never 
progressed beyond polytheism; never really far beyond 
polydemonism. ‘The Babylonians imagined the whole 
earth to be peopled with demons—with evil genii that 
stalked and afflicted men with floods and plagues and 
darkness. “The gods themselves were often regarded by 
the priests as mere snivelling wretches forever hunger- 
ing for scraps from the temple altars. (That was but 
natural, for no god can be a hero to his valet.) In one 
of the Babylonian scriptures the gods are actually com- 
pared to the flies that buzz around the sacrificial car- 
casses. In another place, where the story of the Flood 
is recounted, they are spoken of as dogs: 


The gods were frightened at the deluge; 
They fled, they climbed to the highest heaven. 
The gods crouched like dogs; 

They cringed by the walls! ... 


And ethically the Babylonians were just as primitive. 
Ritual scrupulousness seemed to them far more im- 
portant than human rectitude; sacrificial omissions 
seemed to them far more heinous than moral offenses. 
Taboos dogged their every step in life, and “‘bad luck’”’ 
threatened them at every turn. Every seventh day was 
regarded as somehow “‘evil,’’ and on it special sacrifices 
were fearfully offered and all manner of special taboos 
were observed. For instance, the princes were forbidden 
to go forth on journeys on that day, or to eat meat cooked 


74 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


over a fire. Every fourth of those “evil seventh days’’ 
was particularly dreaded, for it marked the beginning 
of the waning of the moon’s power. On it desperate 
efforts were made to placate the demons, and thus 
avert the unluckiness otherwise certain to come with the 
day. Significantly enough, the Babylonians called it 
Shabatum, a name strikingly like that given by the 
Hebrews, to their holy day, the Sabbath. It is highly 
probable that the Hebrews actually got their Sabbath 
_ from the Babylonian Shabatum, for we know they paid 
little heed to its observance until after they had lived in 
exile in Babylonia from 586 B. Cc. to 536 B. Cc. But 
note how differently the Hebrews regarded the day. To 
them it was holy, not evil. “The Hebrews told them- 
selves that the Sabbath was a divinely appointed ‘‘day 
of rest,’’ and though they observed on it many of the old 
Shabatum taboos, they did so not out of fear of the 
genii but out of respect for their God. “Their New Moon 
festival was an ocassion for rejoicing, not for added 
trembling and dread. 

The contrast is no slight one. It reveals glaringly the 
inferiority, the essential primitiveness, of which religious 
thought in Babylonia never quite rid itself. “The Baby- 
lonians developed a vast mythology, but they graced it 
with no ethical meaning. “They told many tales about 
their gods, about the creation of the world, the first man, 
the great flood, and so forth. But these tales were al- 
most unrelievedly wild, crude, even foul. When we 
meet them again in the Old Testament—for those 
stories, like the Shabatum taboos, seem to have been 
taken over from the Babylonians by the Hebrew exiles— 
we find them changed almost beyond recognition. In 








RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 75 


the Bible they are no longer mere bawdy romancings 
told for the mere joy of their telling, but passionate ser- 
mons recited to bring home certain moral ideals. Ethic- 
ally the Babylonians were little more than grown-up 
children. Fear still had hold of them and kept them 
slaves. Even though they were rich and powerful, even 
though they were the lords of the green earth and 
thought themselves the masters of the starry skies, still 
they remained cravens in their hearts. Beneath all their 
bluster they were timorous and worried. ‘They were 
Bit Ald weiss, Airaid... 0%) |. 


a 
- 


III. THE EGYPTIANS 


TO trace the further development of religion we 
must go now from Babylonia to ancient Egypt. Of 
course, in very early times the Egyptians, like the rest 
of the primitive peoples of the earth, were simple ani- 
mists. All things around them seemed to be animated 
by certain wilful spirits; and to these spirits the Egyp- 
tians paid terrified homage. Only a few of the spirits 
were thought to dwell in natural phenomena such as 
the sun, the moon, and the great River Nile. The 
majority were imagined to have their habitation in vari- 
ous species of animals and birds. Each tribe—there 
seem to have been forty-two of them in Egypt about 
seven thousand years ago—worshipped the spirit in- 
habiting some particular species of living creature, and 
looked to it for protection. One worshipped the ram, 
another the bull, a third the lion; others worshipped the 
serpent, the cat, the goat, the ass, the falcon, the hippo- 
potamus, the pig, and the vulture. Evidently the earli- 
est religion of Egypt must have been a totemism rather 





76 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


like that of the American Indians, each tribe being named 
after the animal which it held sacred, and which it may 
have looked on as its spiritual ancestor. 

But as civilization advanced among the Egyptians, the 
primitiveness of their totemism began to disappear. The 
“powers” began to be thought of no longer as mere 
animals but rather as gods symbolized by animals. The 
idols, which originally may have been simple images of 
beasts, were now carved to represent bodies whose heads 
alone were those of beasts. Or occasionally—as in the 
case of the sphinx——the body was still that of an animal, 
but the head was human. And when, after much 
wandering, the tribes settled down at last in what be- 
came their fixed provinces, these half-animal gods be- 
came localized. For instance, Amon, who was symbol- 
ized by a ram, became the god of the village of Thebes; 
| Ptah, the bull-god, became the deity of Memphis; Set, 
the ass-god, became the protector of the village of 
Ombos. In every town the stone temple of the local 
god towered over the mud hovels of the people. It 
was literally the “house of the god,’ and the priests in 
it were called the god’s servants. Morning, noon, and 
night they waited on the idol that glowered in the 
terrifying dimness of the inner sanctuary. They washed 
and dressed it in the morning, gave it food, and flattered 
it with hymns. At night they removed its vestments 
and figuratively put it to bed. Stony and immobile as 
it was, the idol nevertheless seemed to them the dwelling 
place of the most dreadfully potent force in the world. 
Perhaps the more astute of the priests, those who had 
served longest and profited most by the cult, knew 
better. But certainly the people did not. The people, 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 77 


the myriads of sweating serfs and starving peasants— 
they believed. Unalterably they believed that lodged in 
the idol there was a spirit that could bring them life 
or death. Probably the majority of the priests believed 
likewise, for the proverb ‘‘as the people, so the priest’ 
states a truth that holds for all races, not merely the 
Hebrews. Rare indeed, therefore—and silent as night 
—must have been the doubters in those days of un- 


bridled faith: ....°. 
2 


BUT what happened later in many other lands hap- 
pened of course in Egypt, too. Though the fear of 
terrorful spirits never ceased to be a stark and ominous 
reality, the exact identity of those spirits wavered and 
continually changed. ‘The fusion of the Egyptian tribes 
brought with it a fusion of the tribal deities. The 
temples became the houses not of single gods, but of 
whole families. Usually the original spirit of the temple 
was given a neighboring goddess for a wife, and a 
minor godling for a son. Or sometimes he was given 
two goddesses as wives. And that tendency, begun on 
so small a scale, was carried on until at last one god 
was exalted over all the rest in Egypt. Centuries before 
the Hebrews came up out of the night of desert savagery, 
we find the Egyptians already groping their way toward 
the idea of a monotheism, a One God. It was political 
rather than philosophical considerations that impelled 
the Egyptians in such a direction. As soon as some 
tribal chieftain managed to fight his way to the throne 
of the land, so soon did he try to set his tribal god on 
the throne of the heavens. And to give permanence to 








78 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 

the arrangement, he naturally was driven to attempt the 
destruction of all the defeated but still menacing gods. 
Usually he tried to wipe them out by declaring them 
to be merely so many vagrant manifestations of his own 
deity. Or else his priests invented elaborate mythologies 
to prove that his god had been the very first in the uni- 
verse, and had actually created all the other deities. 
Century after century such stratagems were resorted to. 
Every king cherished the same futile hope of establishing 
his dynasty forever, and for that reason every king tried 


to prove his god to be the only one worthy of wor- 
ShIpssa te. 


3 


BUT no one of the attempts ever quite succeeded. 
Even the valiant attempt of the famous King Ikhnaton 
came to naught. This Ikhnaton, who reigned in Egypt 
from about 1375 to 1350 B. c., has not unjustly been 
called the first individual in human history. With amaz- 
ing clarity of vision and singleness of purpose he set 
himself the task of making the religion of Egypt an 
absolute monotheism. He broke completely with the 
polytheistic past, denying all the favorite old gods and 
suppressing their cults. Only Aton, the Sun-God, was 
recognized, and to Him every human knee was made to 
bend, and every tongue to give homage. The king gave 
up the name, Amonhotep, by which he had been known 
all his life, simply because it contained the name of the 
old god, Amon. Instead he called himself Ikhnaton, 
which meant “Spirit of Aton.’’ Because his old capital 
was the center of Amon worship, the king gave that up, 
too. He built himself an entirely new city, calling it 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 79 


Akhetaton, meaning “Horizon of Aton.”’ He tried to 
revolutionize every phase of Egyptian life, spurning all 
the old conventions and creating by flats even a new 
art and literature! ... 


Of course, the priests of the fallen gods fought him 
bitterly, for he had taken the bread—and honey—right 
out of their mouths. But they could do little, for the 
power of Ikhnaton was absolute in all his empire. He 
sent stone masons all through Egypt to erase the names 
of the old gods from the temples and pyramids. He 
caused even his own father’s name to be obliterated be- 
cause it contained the name of Amon! And in his new 
capital he built a splendid temple to his One God, Aton, 
adoring him with sumptuous sacrifices and with hymns 
of surpassing beauty. 


Thy dawning, O Living Aton, is 
beautiful on the horizon. .. . 

O, Beginning of Life, Thou art all, 

and Thy rays encompass all. 

Manifold are Thy works, One oth Only 
God, Whose power none other possesseth; 
the whole earth hast Thou created 
according to Thine own understanding. 
When Thou wast alone didst Thou create 
man and beast, both large and small; 

all that go upon their feet, all that 

fly on wings; yea, and all the foreign 
lands, even Syria and Kush besides this 
land of Egypt. Thou settest all in their 
place, and providest all with their 

needs. . [though] diverse are their 
tongues, en forms, their skins. 

O how goodly are Thy designs, O Lord: 
that there is a Nile in the sky for 


80 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


strangers and for the cattle of every 
land. . . . Thou art He who art in my 
soul; Thou art the life of life; 


through Thee men live! 


- ¢ <n 


C4 AsyDO5™ 


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i O51R1S) 


USMS BERLE ME 
SAVAGES } 


ANCIENT EGYPT 


hood waxed fat with might. 





So did he sing, that 
great Egyptian heretic, 
centuries before ever a 
Hebrew psalmist had 
appeared on earth! 

But none there was 
to sing so after him. 
When Ikhnaton died, 
Aton also died. The 
priests of Amon and 
Re and the other old 
gods quickly came into 
their own again, setting 
up their old altars, and 
chanting their old 
spells. “The very son- 
in-law of the man who 
so zealously altered his 
name from Amonhotep 
to Ikhnaton thought it 
wise to change his own 
name from Tutenkha- 
ton back to Tutenkha- 
men. Once more 
Thebes was made the 
capital, and its priest- 
Two per cent of the 


entire population (one out of every fifty Egyptians!) 





- RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 81 


became actual slaves in the temples; and a seventh of 
all the arable soil in the realm became temple property. 
The high-priests grew more powerful year by year, 
and in the end one of them actually seized the 
crown! . .. And thus was all the labor of that royal 
heretic, Ikhnaton, made to come to naught. 

Yet a vestige of that impetuous reform did endure. 
The idea of a monotheism, of a single God in all the 
universe, was never quite blotted out from Ikhnaton’s 
day on. Somehow the idea lingered in the land, per- 
sistently affecting at least the language if not the life of 
the priests. More and more the old gods were merged 
together; even their names were hyphenated. Amon and 
Re were spoken of as one from then on—Amon-Re. 
And what was more important, this composite god was 
now thought of not as a spirit animating merely a golden 
disc in the heavens, but as a spirit flaming in the hearts 
of men. Not merely in the hearts of kings, but in the 
hearts of men—all men! . . . So the impatient heretic, 
the tyrant reformer, Ikhnaton, though he failed, never- 
theless succeeded. AQ little, perhaps the veriest trifle, of 
that which he had preached while he was yet alive re- 
mained on after his death. But it was an enduring 
EETLGs Eee ns 

4 

THE leaning toward monotheism was not, however, 
the chief distinction of old Egypt's religion. One must 
realize that the tendency in that direction was marked 
only in the upper levels of religious thinking in Egypt. 
It arose partly out of philosophical reasoning and largely 
out of political necessity, and therefore it did not 
even touch the life of the plain people in the land. So 


82 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


far as the Egyptian masses were concerned, no tendency 
toward monotheisn1 was even existent. “The masses 
laboring on the banks of the Nile, like the masses every- 
where else, were not much given to abstract theologizing. 
Harried and hounded by a myriad terrors, they could do 
no more than reach out into the blue for help, and then 
trust to luck that they had clutched for it in the right 
direction. The masses had neither the time nor the 
brains to speculate on the nature of the spirits who gave 
the help, or the manner in which they gave it. Ques- 
tions of such a nature had to be handed over by them to 
the priests and learned men to solve. It was not the 
peasant’s part to reason how; his was but to fear and 
DOweniean 

From first to last, therefore, the masses of Egypt con- 
tinued to worship their innumerable half-animal gods, 
paying heed neither to the fiats of kings nor the dis- 
quisitions of priests. Of course, the mob had its favorite 
gods, differing at various times and in various localities; 
for with the unconscionable fickleness characteristic of 
mobs, it dropped its favorites about as fast as it took 
them up. Only one god, Osiris, managed to hold his 
place in the affections of the people throughout Egypt's 
long history. Originally this Osiris seems to have been 
the spirit who made the crops grow, the god of vegeta- 
tion comparable to Tammuz of the Babylonians. As 
such he was of great importance almost from the begin- 
ning, for the Egyptians were an agricultural people who 
depended on the crops for their very life. As time went 
on, therefore, Osiris assumed a place of more and more 
importance in the minds of the people, until at last they 
came to look on him as the Divine Lord of the Nile 


RELIGION FINE ZANGIENT) WORLD 83 


Lands, the God of Justice and Love and nurturing Light. 
In large part his exaltation to this rank was due to the 
spread of a significant myth among the people. ‘The 
story was told how once on a time Osiris, this god of 
nurturing Light and Good, was treacherously put to 
death by Set, the god of withering Darkness and Evil. 
When Isis, the loving wife of Osiris, learnt of the mur- 
der, she went up and down the land to find the body 
of her lord, lamenting sorely as she went, and weeping 
until the Nile actually overflowed its banks. Isis found 
the body at last and buried it; but not very carefully. 
As a result, while she was away looking after her father- 
less son, Horus, the corpse was stolen from its grave. 
‘The wicked Set got possession of it, dismembered it thor- 
oughly, and then hid each fragment in a different place. 
So then Isis had to traverse the land a second time, 
seeking out the pieces of the body, and burying them 
more safely this time in a sealed tomb. And thereupon 
Osiris came to life again! He was miraculously resur- 
rected from death and taken up to heaven; and there in 
heaven, so the myth declared, he lived on eternally! 
Obviously that myth had its origin in an attempt to 
explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation. 
Every autumn seemed to witness the foul murder of all 
that was good to man, and every spring seemed to mark 
its resurrection. And the Egyptians, like most other 
races, came to look on that recurrent rescue of the earth 
from bleakness, cold, and famine, as the most wondrous 
miracle in the universe. Even the dullest serfs could 
not fail to be bewildered by it; even the most cloddish 
minds could not but be eager for some story explaining 


84 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


it. And having agreed upon such a story, those fellahin 
felt impelled for some reason to dramatize and enact it 
year after year. Every spring at Abydos the drama of 
Osiris was enacted by the Egyptians in a stirring passion 
play, much as the peasants in Oberammergau enact the 
drama of Jesus even today. ... 

There is small cause to wonder that in time this folk- 
drama, rooted as it was in the earth’s greatest mystery, 











PYRAMIDS BY THE NILE 


became the very core of Egypt’s religion. Somehow its 
plot seemed to give the key to the whole riddle of life 
and death. The Egyptians reasoned that if it was the 
fate of the god Osiris to be resurrected after death, then 
a way could be found to make it the fate of man, too. 
Of course! All one had to do was be buried properly. 
If only a man’s soul were committed safely into the 








RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 85 
hands of Osiris, and his body embalmed and preserved 
in a tomb, then some day of a surety the two would get 
together again, and the man would walk the earth as 
of yore. At least, so it came to be believed in Egypt as 
long as four thousand years ago. 

In the beginning, however, only the kings were be- 
lieved to stand a chance of resurrection, for they alone 
were thought to have souls. “That was why in those 
days the kings alone were embalmed and mummified. 
Huge pyramids were built to shelter their royal bodies 
against the day of their resurrection, enormous structures 
of brick and stone that still stand today, and no doubt 
will still be standing centuries hence. 

But finally the day of the despotic pyramid builders 
came to an end, and a spirit of democracy crept into the 
land. The bliss of immortality that had formerly been 
reserved only for kings was then promised to all men. 
It came to be admitted that every man had a soul that 
lived on through the winter of death; and for that 
reason every man’s body had to be preserved in the 
hope of ultimate resurrection. Even the bodies of those 
animals that were deemed sacred to the various gods, 
the bulls and rams and cats and crocodiles, were pre- 
served in that hope. At Beni Hasan so many mummified 
cats were laid away that nowadays the cemetery is used 
as a quarry for fertilizer! 


5 


THE dead were thought to lead a curious double life, 
one on earth and the other in heaven at the same time. 
The earthly existence was carried on by the mummy in 
the tomb, and its conservation demanded that food be 





86 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


jaid out for its nourishment at regular intervals. The 
horridest fear in the heart of the dying Egpytian was 
that his heirs would neglect to perform that service, and 
often contracts were made with utter strangers, with 
professional tomb-tenders or neighboring priests, to 
keep the mummy’s larder replenished. And for fear 
that even these solemn contracts might be broken, the 
tombs were carved with piteous verses begging the 
passer-by to offer if not a meal at least a little prayer— 
“‘which costs only the breath of the mouth’’—for the 
neglected dead. . . . Ihe heavenly existence of the dead 
was carried on in the realm of Osiris, and it was de- 
scribed in considerable detail by the Egyptian theolo- 
gians. It was believed that on death the soul of a man 
set out at once to reach a Judgment Hall on high. Evil 
spirits tried to waylay it on the journey, but any soul 
adequately provided with magic formulae could evade 
them all. With these spells the evil spirits could be 
dodged or fought off until finally the soul attained the 
Judgment Hall and stood before the celestial throne of 
Osiris, the Judge. There it gave an account of itself 
to Osiris and his forty-two associate gods. Any soul 
that could truly say: “I come before ye without sin, and 
have done that wherewith the gods are satisfied. I have 
not slain, nor robbed, nor stirred up strife, nor lied, nor 
lost my temper, nor committed adultery, nor stolen tem- 
ple food. . . I have given bread to the hungry, clothes 
to the naked, a ferry to him who had no boat’’—if in 
sincerity it could say all that, then the soul was straight- 
way gathered into the fold of Osiris. But if it could not, 
if it was found wanting when weighed in the heavenly 
balances, then it was cast into a hell, to be rent to shreds 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 87 


by the ‘‘Devouress.’’ For only the righteous souls, only 
the guiltless, were thought to be deserving of life ever- 
ARting ee, 

It was an extraordinary set of beliefs, and reveals a 
moral insight on the part of the Egyptians that must 
have been unmatched in the world of four thousand 
years ago. No other people in that day seems to have 
been capable of conceiving a Judgment Hall where a life 
of moral innocence, and not merely of ritual propriety, 
decided the soul’s fate after death. Of course, certain 
elements in the conception were distinctly primitive; 
for instance, the idea that no soul, however righteous, 
could ever reach the Judgment Hall unless well armed 
with magic formulae to protect it on the way. Such 
a flaw could not but leave an opening for the introduc- 
tion of all sorts of superstitious practices. “To be on 
the safe side, coffins were literally lined with those magic 
formulae, or were packed tight with rolls of parchment 
on which mystic spells were written. “The practice was 
relentlessly opposed by King Ikhnaton, the heretic, and 
during his reign it was rarely if ever observed. But once 
he died, it returned and flourished more rankly than ever 
before. The ancient Egyptians were not yet so free of 
primitive fear, or of primitive measures of defense against 
it, that they dared to rely on their moral guiltlessness 
alone to win them paradise. ‘They still clung to the no- 
tion that there were many evil spirits in the universe 
which could not be fought off by virtue, but only by 
magic. [hey even entertained the notion that the good 
spirits, too, could be controlled by magic. Certain of 
their spells were designed for the express purpose of 
helping sinful souls to dodge the verdict of the Heavenly 





88 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


PE rr a AE RL TS 





Judges and sneak their way into Paradise despite their 
ay bt heal an. 

It is not unlikely that the priests winked at these 
relics of a bygone age, if only because their vogue tended 
to give them great power. For the priests alone knew 
how to write the magic formulae, and thus they alone 
controlled the keys to heaven. At different times they 
gathered many of those formulae together, and made of 
them sacred tomes which later came to be known as the — 
“Book of the Dead,’’ the ‘“‘Book of the Other World,”’ 
and the “Book of the Gates.’’ In them were set down, 
not merely magic phrases, but also maps and travel in- 
structions for the dead. ‘hey were, so to speak, Bae- 
deckers to the Next World. .. . | 

So this chapter on the religion of Egypt must end 
much as did the one on Babylonia. Religion advanced 
in the valley of the Nile to unprecedented heights. There 
earlier than anywhere else in the world—at least so far 
as we know—the idea was conceived of One God ruling 
in all this Universe. “There too was first told the legend 
of a Lord of Light who died at the hands of Darkness, 
only to come to life again and go up to Heaven to receive 
all the righteous there into his embrace. Those were no 
inconsiderable heights for an ancient people to attain. 
. . . But the pity of it was that, though those heights 
were attained, they were not held. Perhaps that decline 
occurred because the Egyptians sank too completely into 
thralldom to the priests. (Save for Ikhnaton, Egypt 
in all her five thousand years of history produced not a 
single prophetic spirit. And prophetic spirits alone can 
keep a people on the heights.) But more fundamentally 
the Egyptians must have failed because they were still 








RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 89 





too close to the primitive. Crude fear still had too 
strong a hold on them. With pathetic earnestness they 
tried to put their trust solely in the goodness of the 
spirits; but always they remained a trifle uncertain, tuck- 
ing away a spell on their person or in their tombs in case 
of need. ‘They tried hard to believe that virtue alone 
would win the favor of the gods; but inevitably they 
added a little incantation, just to be ‘‘on the safe side.’’ 
They could never quite keep from slipping down into 
the slough of magic. No matter how hard they tried, 
they could never for long hold to the heights. For even 
they were still not at home in the universe—even they 
RVereEstill airald "", t:altaide) is). | 


IV. THE GREEKS 


AND now we come to Greece, that little land of broken 
valleys and sea-swept cliffs wherein ancient civilization 
climbed and climbed until it reached its very zenith. 
In the beginning its religion was naturally a terrorful 
worship of the spirits supposed to dwell in stones and 
trees—just such a worship as obtained everywhere else 
in savage times. [he inhabitants of the land then were 
people whom modern scholars call the Minoans, a race 
whose writing has not yet been deciphered, and whose 
history and religion are consequently but little known. 
Judging from remains discovered in Crete and the Aegean 
Islands, the chief deity of the Minoans seems to have 
been a goddess who, like Ishtar of the Babylonians, was 
an impersonation of the principle of fertility, or mother- 
hood. But the Minoans had numerous other deities be- 
sides her, some of them gods and most of them goddesses. 
Only with the coming of the Indo-European Greeks 





90 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


does the religion of the peninsula become better known 
tous. “These invaders were of the same stock as the Hin- 
dus and the other Aryans, and when they swept south- 
ward from Central Europe sometime before 1200 B. C., 
they brought with them their sky-god, Zeus Pater, and 
all their other old Aryan deities. But once established 
in their new home, they speedily merged their religion 


4 Se +5 az 


= = S———s 





Ny \ ait 
fine 


heap 


ANCIENT GREECE 


with the one already existing in the land. They adopted 
the deities of the native Minoans, calling them all rela- 
tions of their own sky-god, Zeus Pater. The great 
fertility-goddess of the Minoans was named Rhea and 
called the mother of Zeus; another goddess, Hera, was 
made his wife; a third, Athena, was called his daughter. 
Two of the native gods were named Poseidon and Hades, 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 91 


and were given to Zeus for brothers; another, Apollo 
by name, was declared his son. Even the crude idols of 
the Minoans, obvious sex symbols sacred to the goddess 
of fertility, were taken over by the newcomers. And 
thus a new religion came into being. In part it was a 
fear-riddled, magic-mongering cult rooted in the half- 
civilization of the Minoans; and in part it was the 
shallow, light-hearted, myth-making cult of the barbaric 
Greeks. 

For many centuries the second element remained domi- 
nant. When the minstrels of classic Greece sang of the 
gods, they sang of glorified men: gay, lustful, brawling 
heroes, who sported about on Mount Olympus without 
giving the slightest heed to morality or property. And 
there seems to have been no thought of any compelling 
tie between the people and the gods. Even centuries 
later the philosopher Aristotle solemnly wrote, ‘‘to love 
God would be improper.”’ 

But if the early Greeks did not love their deities, 
neither did they greatly fear them. ‘The tales that are 
called Homeric reveal almost no trace of any terror of 
the gods. “The people seem to have regarded Zeus and 
his divine family with a measure of fondness, perhaps 
even with a measure of awe—but nothing more. Per- 
haps this was because the priesthood never attained any 
great power in ancient Greece. A well-organized priestly 
caste inevitably succeeds in hammering the ‘‘fear of the 
gods’’ deeply—usually too deeply—into the hearts of 
the people. But no such caste ever existed among the 
Greeks. The priests in the land were but minor state 
officials who differed very little from laymen, save on the 
rare occasions when sacrifices had to be formally offered 





v2 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


to the gods. “The images of the gods were carved by 
artists who thought only of beauty, not by holy men 
bowed in terror or reverence. [he cult was solemn and 
dignified, but far from intensely moving. ‘The ornate 
sacrificial etiquette that marked the religions of Baby- 
lonia and Egypt was largely unknown in early Greece. 


2 


BUT though that shallow, light-hearted cult man- 
aged to persist for a while, ultimately it had no alterna- 
tive but to fade away and be forgotten. or it lacked 
warmth and fervor. It had too little of that commingled 
terror and hope, too little of that blasting fear and 
febrile yearning, which is the stuff whereof enduring 
faiths are made. Essentially the cult was without point, 
without much value or helpfulness in the business of 
keeping alive. It held out neither a comforting hand nor 
even a threatening fist to man. And therefore it could 
not possibly keep alive itself. Had it possessed an 
elaborate ritual and a politically powerful priesthood, no 
doubt it could have subsisted much longer than it did. 
(Well-intrenched ecclesiastical systems have protracted 
the life of many an outworn religion.) But the Olym- 
pian cult, as we have already seen, had never been able 
to develop such a preservative for itself. For a while it 
hung ripe on the bough of Greek thought, and then the 
people allowed it to fall to the ground and rot there. 
Both sage and boor, aristocrat and slave, turned from it 
in despair. None of them found it to be the indis- 
pensable viand that sustains life and makes it worth 
while. To none of them could it bring salvation. So 


tidied) ape 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 93 


But it did not die of a sudden. Already by the sixth 
century B. C. the vanity of the Olympian cult was sensed 
by the keener minds in Athens and the other city-states 
of Greece. But not until the fourth century did it really 
give up the ghost. And during all those years of its 
slow disintegration, new approaches to salvation were 
being discovered by the Greeks. “The learned took to 
philosophy, for they were far advanced in mentality and 
fully able to extract satisfaction from such a discipline. 
Had primitive fear swirled higher around them, of 
course they would never have been capable of being 
sustained by philosophy. “They would have resorted 
instead to magic spells for help, and gone clutching be- 
wilderedly at mythical spirits. But the flood of fear 
had subsided, and only a slough of despond was left. It 
was not terror, therefore, so much as disquiet that 
spurred the learned folk of Hellas to go seeking salva- 
tion. “The advance of the race out of the hazards of the 
primeval forest had already made life posstble—but it 
had not yet made life reasonable. Asa result, the Greek 
sages were intent not so much on self-preservation as on 
self-realization. . . . 

And that was why they turned from the childish 
vanities of the Olympian cult to the rigors of philosophy. 
Through philosophy, that trying discipline of the mind 
which indefatigably gropes and claws its way in the 
hope that at last it can uncover the why of all things— 
through philosophy the learned of Greece sought to at- 
tain that sense of security which we call salvation. A 
whole galaxy of sages deployed their forces in the realm 
of the spirit, each of them bent on finding a means not 
of material protection but of spiritual satisfaction. each 





oat THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


of them grailing not so much for a way of living as for 
the way of Life. 

We are tempted to go off here at a tangent, and speak 
at length of the great philosophers that ancient Greece 
produced. ‘There was first of all Thales, who lived 
fully twenty-six hundred years ago; then there were 
Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Empedocles; 
there were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Each of them, 
in his own way and according to his own lights, went 
groping, searching, after that sense of security without 
which life is either terror or vanity. For the most part 
they did not even bother to discuss the old religion and 
the old gods. They simply shrugged their shoulders at 
their mention, and passed them by. Occasionally a 
dramatist, like Euripides, stopped to take a fling at them; 
but the philosophers, as a general thing, let them alone. 
They struck off along paths that led to new gods, or 
rather, to a new idea of god, of the One God, whom 
their new-found logic told them must be the ultimate 
source of power in all the universe. Almost without 
exception the sages seem to have been conscious of some 
such unifying God. ‘Thales called Him “‘the Intelligence 
of the world.’ ‘The Stoics described Him as ‘‘the Help- 
ing of man by man.”’ Plato called Him “‘the Idea of © 
Good.’’ And so most of the other philosophers. .. . 


3 


BUT the plain people, the masses, could not follow 
along the steep, narrow paths of hard reason up which 
the philosophers clambered. Indeed, they sometimes 
resented the temerity of those philosophers, and violently 
dragged them down. ‘They exiled Anaxagoras, and 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 95 


Protagoras, and put the great Socrates to death. They 
could not fathom what those philosophers were after. 
The plain people of Greece were, after all, still quite 
primitive. “They were not yet capable of wondering as 
to the ultimate reason for living; they still wanted to 
know just how to keep alive. With them the vital 
problem was not self-realization, but still self-preserva- 
tion. For they were still not at home in the universe. 
They were still afraid! ... 

Quite naturally, therefore, the plain people fell back 
on magic. “The old Minoan element, that dark mum- 
bling of spells between chattering teeth, came sweeping 
back over the land in a mounting wave of hysteria. Even 
in the gay, sunny days of Olympian worship there had 
always been among the plain people a cowering worship 
of ghosts. “There had always persisted a rooted belief 
in the power of certain evil spirits to maim, sicken, and 
kill; and always there had been the desire to placate those 
spirits with sacrifices, or drive them away with spells or 
a good beating. But now that primitive demon-wor- 
ship no longer lurked in haggard woods or slum alley- 
ways. It crawled out and began to flaunt itself in 
the open. And there was none left in all Hellas to drive 
it back. Like some loathsome nocturnal beast out of 
the jungle it bared its fangs and went ravishing through 
PrresiaiGdaee ss: 

And side by side with this demon-worship there came 
a second monster of faith: an ecstatic, drunken savior- 
worship. In origin it seems to have been foreign to 
Greece, an exotic thing from the hinterland and the 
orient; but for all that it did not want for prey. The 
cuck and scum of a bundred foreign populations had been 


96 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


dragged in chains to Athens and the other Greek cities. 
Hordes of serfs and slaves festered in crowded slums, or 
slaved in mines and fields and forests. And eagerly, 
frenziedly those hordes threw themselves in the path of 
this strange beast. Secret cults of mystic salvation arose 
in every corner of the land, little sodalities preaching a 
religion of ecstatic hope and orgiastic practice. “They 
were called ‘‘Mysteries,’’ and almost without exception 
they circled around the idea of a god who died and was 
resurrected. As we have already seen, that idea was 
obviously inspired by the sight of the annual death and 
rebirth of the crops. [he idea was known and gave 
rise to cults not alone in Egypt, but in almost all the 
other Mediterranean lands. Indeed, throughout the 
world one discovers signs of its quondam prevalence. 
And that scattered dissemination was hardly due to wide- 
spread borrowing from a single source; rather it was the 
result of a widespread clutching in a single direction. 
No matter how far the races of man may be scattered 
across the face of the earth, they are all hounded by 
similar dangers and cursed with similar fears. Asa con- 
sequence they have all been forced to hit on more or less 
similar means of defense. Mankind everywhere, in 
Mexico and Iceland, in Zululand and China, makes 
more or less the same wild guesses in its convulsive effort 
to solve the riddle of existence. And that is why we 
find this complex idea of a slain and resurrected god 
common in many parts of the world. It was one of 
those guesses. one of those blindly hopeful snatches after 
security, which a race drowning in insecurity instinc- 
tively felt forced to make, no matter where it dwelt. 

In very early times that idea flourished not alone 


REEIGIONTING THEVANGCIENT WORLD. 97 


among the Babylonians and Egyptians, but also among 
the barbaric tribes in and around Greece. Among the 
latter it gave rise to a whole farrago of myths telling how 
some god—Dionysus, Zagreus, Zabazius, or Orpheus— 
had once upon a time gone madly careering through 
the woods, had been torn to pieces and destroyed, 
and then had been magically restored to life again. 
And as a corollary of those myths there had arisen 
the companion belief that by imitative magic every 
human being could repeat that divine experience. Every 
mortal could take on immortality simply by doing 
as the god had done. A man had only to eat the 
flesh and guzzle the blood of the animal sacred to 
his savior-god, whirl around in orgiastic passion, 
hack at his own flesh in madness, and shout, scream, 
howl to the skies, and then in a moment of frenzy—an 
“enthusiasm’’ it was called in Greek—he was of a sudden 
overwhelmed by the conviction that he actually was the 
god! He had to experience a mystical orgasm that sent 
silver, sensory storms sweeping through his flesh, that set 
a diapason of nerves quivering in his rigid body, that 
lifted him up, up, up, till with a sob of unendurable 
ecstasy he felt all the evil literally gush out of his being 

. and then he knew himself at last to be— 
cavinelt 24... 


4 


SUCH was the wild flame that burnt in most of the 
mysteries; and one cannot wonder that myriads in 
Greece went flocking to it once the sun of Olympian 
worship could no longer warm their blood. It gave 
them hope and cheer; it won them Paradise. It gave 


98 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





them life—life in some other and better world—tife im- 
mortal and ever-blessed. And that was, after all, the 
ultimate want of the submerged masses in Greece. “hey 
had given up this world as hopeless, as utterly barren 
of all chance of joy for them. ‘Those wretched helots, 
ground in the dust beneath the heel of the upper classes, 
could not possibly see any remaining hope of peace for 
them in this vale of tears. But being still human, still 
charged with that insensate Will to Live which is life’s 
primal spark in man, they could not sit supinely by and 
let death overtake them. No, they had still to want 
for life, for restful, blessed, enduring life. Only they 
had perforce to want it in some other world... . 
Now the old Olympian worship had done nothing to 
satisfy that want. Only the half-divine heroes—and not 
all even of them—vwere assured a life in the Elysian 
Fields when death took them from this earth. Ordinary 
men, no matter how righteous and worthy, were all 
consigned to Hades after death. “There in dank subter- 
ranean realms their spectral forms, bereft of bones and 
sinews, swept ‘‘shadow-like around,” and chattered tone- 
lessly like so many bats. They knew no bliss, no rest, 
no peace—only unbroken gloom and misery. No won- 
der Achilles cried: ‘‘Nay, speak not comfortingly to me 
of death, O great Odysseus. Far rather would I live 
on earth the hireling of another, with a landless man who 
is himself destitute, than bear sway over all the dead 
that be departed!’ . . . But the new worship, these 
mysteries come down from Thrace or across the sea 
from Egypt and Asia Minor, told a far different tale. 
They declared that for every man, no matter how poor 
or vicious, there was a place in heaven. All one had to 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 99 


do was to be “‘initiated’’ into the secrets of the cult, puri- 
fying oneself by baptism in blood or water, dancing 
the sacred dances, partaking of the sacred offering, and 
finally gazing on certain very sacred and mysterious 
cult objects. Once a man performed those rites, then 
salvation was assured him, and no excess of vice and 
moral turpitude could close the gates of paradise in his 
face. He was saved forevermore! ... | 

Perhaps as early as 1000 B. c. the Greeks were already 
practicing what were called the Eleusinian mysteries; 
but these were of a relatively sober and formal character. 
Not until the sixth century B.C. do we hear of more 
violent and primitive mysteries in Greece, and then they 
are associated with the name of Orpheus. They were 
imported largely from Thrace, where they had long been 
indulged in by barbaric tribes; and the faith-hungry 
Greeks took to them with avidity. For one thing, there 
was the element of dread secrecy about these strange 
mysteries—and secrecy has always been enormously at- 
tractive to inferior minds. Only those who were sol- 
emnly initiated into the cult could have any knowledge 
of its secrets, or enjoy the immortal bliss which that 
knowledge was supposed to confer. All others were 
condemned to writhe forever in a foul, loathsome 
Brel ipa. 

These Orphic mysteries therefore flourished luxuri- 
antly, as did the many other mysteries that later invaded 
Greece. When the cults of the Egyptian Osiris and of 
the Phrygian Attis were introduced, they too won ini- 
tiates by the thousand. It was inevitable that they 
should do so, for the lure they held out was irresistible 
to the people. Before the eyes of a mob of low-caste 


100 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


peasants and slum-dwelling slaves they dangled a high 
promise, a glittering hope. “They offered divinity, im- 
mortality, paradise, and all at the price of orgies which 
seemed in themselves a delirious delight. How then 
could they possibly be resisted? .. . 

And the vogue of those irresistible mysteries brought 
the ancient religion of ancient Greece to an end. Only 
the mysteries survived, increasing in complexity genera- 
tion after generation, and spreading throughout all the 
lands bordering the Mediterranean. Even after Chris- 
tianity came they still flourished. Indeed they almost 
made Christianity itself another mystery. 

But that is another story. ... 


V. THE ROMANS 


THE religious history of Rome was in many respects 
strikingly like that of Greece. It began, of course, in 
the universal primitive belief that all objects are animated 
by resident or roving spirits. But the chief of these 
spirits were of a peculiar type in Rome, being not tribal 
but family deities. “That was because the early Romans 
‘were a farming folk divided not into large units like 
tribes, but into small families. Naturally enough, the 
primal aim of the religion was the perpetuation of these 
small families; and the principal spirits, therefore, were 
those which guarded the home. Each man was believed 
to have what was called a Genius, a spirit personifying 
his virility; and each woman had what was called 
a Juno, a spirit personifying her power to conceive. 
(The early Romans, like most other primitive peoples, 
were driven by their constant struggle against extinction 
to consider the power of reproduction a miraculous and 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 101 


highly divine thing.) The threshold of every house had 
its guardian spirit called Janus, just as the hearth had its 
Vesta, the storeroom had its Penates, and the farm had 
its Lares. 

The favor of these spirits was courted with simple 
ceremonies on fixed holy days, each family having its 
own altar on its own land, and its own priest in the 
person of the pater familias, the father of the family. 
Some of the spirits were also worshipped with minor 
rites observed in everyday life. or instance, after every 
midday meal a sort of ‘grace’ was offered to Vesta by 
throwing a salt cake into the hearth-fire. 

But this simple family cult had to give way in time 
to a less primitive form of religion. Harried by con- 
tinual attacks of enemy tribes, the little family groups 
were forced to consolidate into the city-state of Rome; 
and then a state religion arose. It centered chiefly around 
a god of war who was called Mars (it was just like the 
Romans to make a god of war their chief deity), and 
included the worship also of other gods, especially a 
sky-god, Jupiter, the Roman version of the Greek 
Zeus-pater. The king of the city-state was the high- 
priest of this newer Roman religion, and numerous minor 
priests aided him at the state altars. But there was no 
great fervor in the cult, for it was far more a political 
than a religious institution. It was a formal, civic affair, 
and though many festivals were listed in its elaborate 
calendar, no demands were made on the people to take 
a passionate partin them. Most of those festivals must 
have antedated the state religion, for they were marked 
by magic rites of evident primitiveness. There was, 
for instance, the Lupercalia, a festival at which the wor- 





102 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


shippers smeared themselves with sacrificial blood from 
a dog or goat, sponged themselves with milk-soaked 
wads of wool, clad themselves in goat-skins, and then 
danced through the streets of the city, striking the women 
they met with bits of skin to make them fertile... . 
‘Then there was the Saturnalia, celebrated on the 25th of 
December, the signal for more wild dancing, and espe- 
cially for giving gifts and lighting many candles. . 

But the old family religion still persisted, despite the 
institution of this state cult. The worship of the hearth 
spirits still went on, and still a great concern was felt 
about evil ghosts and demons. For protection, fire- 
brands used to be tied to the tails of foxes, who were 
then let loose in the fields to frighten away the crop- 
devouring demons. For further protection, men and 
cattle were passed through fire so that they might be 
magically purified. “Taboos of a thousand varieties to 
ward off as many sorts of danger were scrupulously ob- 
served in every house in the growing town. The 
religion of the city-state of Rome was only supposed to 
be the new state cult; actually the people still clung to 
the family cult of earlier days. . . . 

A distinct change did occur, however, about the sixth 
century B. C. It came as an after-effect of the invasion 
of the Etruscans, a race with apparently higher capacities 
for civilization than the original Romans. They took 
over the state religion and made it a thing of far greater 
importance than ever it had been before. New gods were 
introduced: Minerva, Diana, and others. A college of 
priests was founded, and the priesthood was organized 
under a chief who was called Pontifex Maximus. For 
the first time in the history of Rome temples were built, 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 103 


and images of the gods were placed in them and wor- 
shipped. 

But even then the state religion remained in large part 
a formal affair. It had too little emotional drive, too 
slight a relation to fear and hope, ever to be able ta 
enter deep into the life of the people. The priests were 
more or less civic officials who were left to attend toa 
the gods much as in constitutional monarchies the 
chamberlains are left to attend to the kings. The gods 
demanded that the vows the people made to them should 
be most scrupulously observed; but they insisted on very 
little else. “They were not immoral or venal, like the 
gods of the Olympian religion, but neither were they 
puritanically moral or tyrannically strict, like, for in- 
stance, the God of the Hebrews. They seemed to be 
quite content with purely formal obeisance. . . . 


ys 


OF course, such a religion, clean but not very ex- 
citing, proper but not very compelling, could not persist 
for long. Between 500 and 200 B. C. it deteriorated 
and sank into almost complete bankruptcy. The whole 
structure rotted away from corruption, and finally 
toppled to the ground. And with it toppled the family 
religion. Rome by that time had become a vast empire: 
rich, mighty, and not a little dissolute. Roman citizens 
had gone forth as soldiers or traders to the farthest ends 
of the known world, and had come back spoiled. The 
old Roman family, which had been so important a fac- 
tor of social health in the early life of the people, fell 
into decay; and with it the old family gods went into 
the limbo. The priests became grafting politicians, and 


104 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


their training colleges mere political clubs. And then 
the old order ended. 

But as fast as the old gods fell away, new gods arose. 
For the most part they were the savior-gods of the 
Orient, those lusty relics of the savage past which were 
immortal in more than myth. “The Roman legions had 
gone out to conquer all the world, only to come back 
conquered by all its gods. “he mysteries that had spread 
like a plague throughout Greece in the days of its decay 
now found similar soil in which to-flourish in Rome. 
As early as 200 B. C. the cult of Cybele, “‘the Great 
Mother of the Gods,’’ was brought to the city. Imported 
from Asia Minor, where it may have developed out of 
the old Babylonian worship of Ishtar, this mystery 
found its chief sanctuary on the Vatican Hill—almost 
on the precise spot where the basilica of St. Peters now 
stands. “There, and wherever else in the empire the cult 
had a following, spring festivals of almost incredible 
bestiality were held. “[he people gathered around altars 
erected under sacred trees, and amid the thundering of 
drums, the screeching of flutes, and the clashing of 
cymbals, they wildly sought salvation of their goddess. 
First the lower priests, excited by the barbaric music, 
would begin to whirl themselves around convulsively. 
With mad eyes and streaming hair they would whirl 
themselves around until, rapt in a frenzy and insensible 
to pain, they would begin to hack at their own flesh— 
hack and slash at their own bodies until both altar and 
tree were red with their spurting blood. And then the 
spectators, caught up and swept out of their minds by 
the tumult, would suddenly join in the dance. A mad 
light would leap into their eyes at the sight of the blood 





——E 


RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 105 


and the sound of the throbbing music; jaws would open 
wide in their waggling heads, and limbs would swing 
out flail-like to the beat-beat of drums and cymbals. 
And then first one, then another, would suddenly tear 
off all his clothes, and with a manic shout would seize 
a sword from the heap ready at hand. Howling with 
ecstasy he would hack at himself until, exhausted at last, 
he fell and lay bleeding in a ditch. 

Of course, such self-mutilation was not the ordinary 
act of devotion in the cult of Cybele. Only those of the 
extremest faith, those who desired to become actual 
priests of the goddess, ever went to such excesses. But 
even the common followers, the ordinary first-degree 
initiates, went through rites which were more than ade- 
quately grucsome. ‘There was, for example, the rite 
called the Tauroboleum. ‘The candidate was placed ina 
pit and then washed in the blood of a bull slaughtered 
over his head. He had to lave himself in the warm blood 
as it came dripping through the crevices between the 
planks covering the pit; he had to crane up avidly and 
receive it on his face, in his ears, his eyes, even his mouth. 
And thus he was initiated into the mystery. . . . Mad- 
ness? No, merely logic gone wild because based on a wild 
hypothesis. The first axiom of primitive magic held 
that any quality could be acquired merely by consuming 
the proper part of a creature already possessing that 
quality. For instance, a man could take on his enemy’s 
strength merely by eating his enemy’s liver; he could 
acquire his father’s cunning simply by consuming his 
father’s eyes. So to acquire his god’s immortality it 
seemed only necessary to quaff that god’s blood—a feat 
not at all impossible because the god was usually 





106 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


imagined to be incarnate in some sacred human being or 
animal. Such was the logic, false but plausible, which 
led to blood-guzzlings like those in the cult of Cybele. 
Such was the reasoning, cracked but intensely human, 
which led men in Rome to seek salvation through the 
Tauroboleum. 

Closely associated with this orgiastic worship of 
Cybele there was also the worship of her lover, Attis. 
This god Attis was believed to have been conceived 
immaculately in the womb of a virgin, and was said to 
have died of self-immolation at the base of a tree. 
Attis was of course but another version of Tammuz, 
Adonis, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Osiris, a god of vegeta- 
tion who died and was reborn every year. His ‘‘passion”’ 
was enacted every spring in Rome, much as the “‘passion”’ 
of Osiris was enacted annually in Egypt. The festival 
began with a “‘day of blood’’—the pagan Black Friday 
—commemorating the death of the young god; and 
after three days it reached a climax in the “‘day of joy,” 
commemorating the god’s resurrection. . . . But Attis 
was by no means the only one of the savior-gods to be 
imported into Rome. The Greek Dionysus, renamed 
Bacchus by the Latins, also had his myriads of followers, 
as did the Egyptian Osiris. Nor was Cybele the only 
mother-goddess, for many of the Romans preferred to 
worship Isis, or Ma, or Bellona, or some other of those 
whoring fertility-spirits common in all of the Orient. 
Indeed, it is quite impossible to give a definitive account 
of all the mystery gods and goddesses whose cults were 
permitted to flourish in imperial Rome. 








RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 107 


3 


OF course, none of these mysteries could make any 
great appeal to the learned among the Romans. ‘The 
higher classes in the republic were forced to drift along 
without any faith whatsoever. ‘he old state religion 
had long lost its power to hold them, and they looked 
on the ancient gods of Rome as either patent frauds or 
mere figures of speech. Among the higher classes even 
as much as among the lower, the old state religion seemed 
as dead as a carcass three days old. . . . But it was not. 
A spark of life still lingered in it, and in time there 
came a man with the will and power to breathe it into 
flame again. “That man was Augustus, one of the out- 
standing figures in Roman history. In the year 31 B.C. 
he took hold of a republic in a state of advanced corrup- 
tion, and by intrigue and shrewdness converted it into 
a sound and flourishing empire. It was solely in order 
to make that empire firm that he set himself the task 
of reviving the old religion. He could not possibly 
use the alien mysteries to attain that end, for those mys- 
teries were in their very nature a divisive and not a 
cohesive force. They addressed themselves primarily 
to the individual, not to the group; they promised in- 
dividual, not social, salvation. Besides, they had little 
concern with this world and its upstart empires. They 
were concerned only with the other world and its eternal 
joys. So Augustus saw no reason to favor the mysteries. 
On the contrary, he sought to drive them out of exist- 
ence by lending all his power and prestige to the mori- 
bund state religion. He built great temples everywhere, 
equipping them with beautiful idols of the old gods. 


108 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


He thoroughly reorganized the priesthood, making 
himself its head. “Then he went further—a long, long 
way further. He realized that, though there were 
already many gods, each with his own following in 
the empire, there was no imperial God to whom all 
might pay homage. So to supply the need he nominated 
himself! By a decree of his own as Emperor, he made 
himself the Deity Supreme! He commanded that the 
guardian spirit of his own person, his ‘‘Genius,’’ be wor- 
shipped in every city throughout the empire; and poets 
and writers were hired to invent legends telling how he, 
Augustus, had been originally fashioned in heaven and 
miraculously brought to the world to save it. And 
as long as he lived, this religion he built around himself 
flourished everywhere in the empire—everywhere save, 
of course, in Palestine, where dwelt the Jews. 

But even the revival under Augustus could not stay 
the debacle of the old religion. On the contrary, it may 
perhaps have hastened it. It but opened the way for 
one more corroding element: the human gods. Suc- 
ceeding emperors emulated Augustus, deifying them- 
selves, and sometimes also their wives, their mistresses, 
even their lewd boy-companions. In time there were 
almost forty names on the roster of these monstrous 
gods! . . . And meanwhile more and more of the gods 
of the East came pouring into the imperial city. ... 

There seemed to be but one sane element left, the 
Cynics. “The word cynic—with a small ‘‘c’’—now con- 
notes a disillusioned, sneering, hopeless individual: but 
in the days when its initial letter was capitalized the 
word connoted an altogether different sort of man. The 
Cynics of that time were preaching philosophers, exalted 











RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 109 


souls who felt themselves called upon to drag the people 
out of the sinkholes of superstition in which they 
floundered. ‘These Cynics stood on the corners of the 
market-place, or on temple steps, and harangued the 
people to abjure the wild existences they were leading 
and go back to the simple, natural life. “They assured 
them there was but one way of Salvation: common 
sense. [hey summoned the people to be brave and 
wise; to be virtuous; above all, to be calm and exercise 
good horse sense! ... 


4 

BUT, despite all their devotion and eagerness, it was 
impossible for those Cynics to work any profound 
change in their fellow-men. The people could not be 
satisfied with the little joys afforded by common sense. 
They were tired, exhausted. Their forbears had wan- 
dered off to all the ends of the earth, traversing seas and 
mountains and deserts and swamps, invading, besieging, 
despoiling, and laying waste. For centuries on end they 
had been running to and fro across the face of the globe. 
And now the stock was run out. Their decadent off- 
spring were in no mood for calm common sense; they 
had no appetite for staid virtue. “They wanted passion, 
excitement! . . . And so now even more than before 
they took to the mysteries. It is true that the cults of 
Cybele, Isis, and Bacchus began to wane a little in their 
popularity; but that was only because a new cult had 
come to take their places. It was the cult of Mithras, 
imported from Persia, where it had arisen out of those 
primitive elements which the prophet Zoroaster had 
failed to stamp out. It had spread since from one land 
to another, from Persia to Babylonia, from Babylonia 


A 


110 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


to the Ionian Isles, and from the Ionian Isles finally to 
Rome. It entered there about the first century B.C., 
and so ready were the Romans to receive it that soon it 
was almost dominant in the empire. 

The root of the mystery was an ancient Persian 
legend which told of a divine hero named Mithras 
whose miraculous birth had been witnessed only by a 
few shepherds come from afar with gifts to adore the 
wonder-child. Mithras grew up to be the most strenu- 
ous champion of the sun-god in his war against the god 
of darkness, and the climax of his career was a life-and- 
death struggle with a mythical sacred bull. By finally 
slaying this bull and letting its blood flood the earth, 
Mithras gave life to the soil, and earned immortality for 
himself. Straightway he was exalted to the abode of the 
Immortals, and there he dwelt as the divine protector of 
all:the faithfultonseartha aimee 
-- Long before the advent of Christianity we find a 
significant religion and an elaborate ritual crystallizing 
, around that legend of Mithras. To this day there exist 
_ along the Danube and in Northern Africa certain sub- 
terranean caves in which are statues and carvings de- 
picting scenes in the tale. Those caves were the secret 
churches of the Mithraists, and in them all manner of 
magic rites were once performed. Three times a day, 
with especial elaborateness on the Sun-day and the 
twenty-fifth of December, the Mithras priests offered 
services in the caves. Libations were poured, bells were 
rung, hymns were chanted, and many candles were 
burnt. Above all, holy sacraments were administered 
to the initiated. The flesh of a sacrificial animal was 
eaten, and its blood was drunk, and thus the celebrants 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 111 





were thought to take on the divinity and immortality 
of their blessed lord, Mithras. By a primitive process 
of reasoning which we have already described in con- 
nection with the Cybele cult, the Mithraists galloped to 
the comforting conclusion that the mere consumption 
of the supposed flesh and blood of the god assured them 
of life everlasting. When they died on this earth they 
expected to ascend to Heaven through seven gates, un- 
locked by seven keys which the Mithras priests pos- 
sessed, and in Heaven they hoped to dwell with Mithras 
until the final Judgment Day. All the unbaptized, both 
living and dead, were to be totally annihilated on that 
Judgment Day. Only the redeemed were to be saved, 
and Mithras, come to earth a second and final time, 
would administer to each of them a last sacrament, and 
then cause them to inherit the world in peace and blessed- 
ness forevermore. . . 

Such in brief was the theology and ritual of Mith- 
raism. It was in all respects a purer mystery than those 
that had proceeded it. It had a distinct ethical content, 
and showed little tendency to encourage riotous and 
orgiastic practices. As a result it showed promise of 
persisting far longer than the other cults. Though 

equally fervent, it was less hysterical than its rivals; 
_ though just as certain of its validity, it was far less given 
to emotional excess. By the first century A. D. it loomed 
up as the foremost religion in the Empire; by the second 
century it seemed destined to become the lasting religion 
of all the Western world. And perhaps it would have 
actually fulfilled that destiny—had it not been for Chris- 
tranity... 

But again. that is another story... . 


112 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


5 

AND with Mithraism in Rome we close this book of 
the religions of the ancient world. “There were other 
religions that had their beginnings in that ancient world: 
but we shall have to tell of them later, for unlike the 
ones already described, they lived on. Neither the 
decay of civilizations nor debacle of empires could de- 
stroy those other religions. Again and again they were 
rent and broken; again and again they were well-nigh 
wiped out. Century after century they were changed 
almost beyond recognition. But nevertheless they lived 
on. And that is why we have to leave their stories to 
be told separately and at greater length... . 

As for these religions whereof we have already 
spoken—they died. “They did not entirely disappear, 
of course. No, fragments of them survived. Isolated 
rites, festive days, theological notions, even some of 
their god-names, persisted. “They took up their abode 
—albeit furtively, clandestinely—in the religions that 
endured. And there they persist to this day. . . . For 
that reason one cannot well refer to those cults of Baby- 
lon, Egypt, and the rest as the ‘‘dead religions.”’ Actu- 
ally they are not dead at all, for the echo of their 
ancient thunder is still to be heard reverberating in 
almost every form of faith existing today. They are 
dead only in name... . 

But that is not their only, nor their most urgent, 
claim on our attention. Those ancient cults would 
deserve to be studied even if not one of their rites or 
myths still survived in the world. For the development 
of those cults marked the development of an entirely 
novel idea in religion. Until the advent of the Osirian 


RELIGION IN THE. ANCIENT WORLD. 113 


and the other mysteries, the whole aim of religion was 
the wresting of terrestrial favors from the gods. Primi- 
tive man uttered spells and offered oblations solely be- 
cause he desired to make his life here on earth less fear- 
ful and insecure. But when man advanced beyond the 
_ primitive, and for the first time paused to consider just 
what chances he really had of satisfying his desire, he 
slowly began to realize how naive and foolish he had 
been. And then despair overwhelmed him. Like a 
day-dreaming boy suddenly brought face to face with 
the harsh, sharp, exigent realities of life, his heart sank 
and he.stood ready to give up the fight. It was hopeless, 
he told himself. “This world was irredeemable and this 
life utterly vain. “There was no chance, not the slightest, 
of ever attaining peace and security here on earth. All 
the spells and prayers and sacrifices imaginable could be 
of no worth in this vale of tears... . 

But still he could not surrender utterly. The hunger 
for self-preservation was still mighty in the bones of 
man, and he could not possibly lie down and let himself 
be annihilated. No, instead he was forced to fly back 
to his old illusions, assuring himself that despite all 
realities he still could attain peace and joy. Only now 
man began to look for those blessings not in this life 
but in some other. Bowing to what seemed the in- 
superable tyrannies governing the natural world, he 
now comforted himself with the tale that his triumph 
must come in a super-natural world. With that in- 
evasible life-lust which is at once the sorriest vice and the 
mightiest virtue of mankind, our ancestor incontinently 
transferred all his hopes from a tangible earth to a hypo- 
thetical heaven! ... 


114 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


The social effect of that great religious change can 
hardly be overestimated. For one thing, it made it 
possible for the few to exploit the many with unprece- 
dented ease and impunity. So long as the credulous 
masses were content to look to some other world for 
their triumph, the crafty few were safe to enjoy their 
triumph in this one. So long as the meek were con- 
cerned only over their treasures in heaven, the strong 
were left free to steal all the treasures of the earth. And 
to such an egregious degree has this other-world hope 
fattened the crafty at the expense of the simple during 
these last two thousand years, that nowadays there are 
some who maintain it was from the very first simply a 
stratagem devised by the crafty to attain that very end. 
Of course, such a theory cannot be taken seriously. It 
is obviously pure romance to imagine so human a hope 
to have been deliberately foisted on humanity by a 
handful of greedy priests or princes. Undoubtedly such 
men did take all possible advantage of the hope—once 
it had come into being. But that was all. They no 
more created that belief in another world than they 
created the belief in ghosts or gods. The poor man’s 
dream of heaven was but one more of those wild clutches 
after security which make up the whole spiritual his- 
tory of the race. And it was as unpremeditated, as 
thoroughly natural and inevitable, as the _ thirsty 
bedouin’s sight of a mirage... . 

But all that is a matter of secondary importance. Our 
main concern is the nature, not the origin or even the 
effect, of this other-world hope. Quite clearly it differed 
in kind, not merely in degree, from the more primitive 
hope confined to this world. Perhaps it was even due 





RELIGION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 115 


to a different impulse. The Celt was driven to religion 
by fear; but the “‘civilized’’ Greek and Roman was 
moved rather by despair. The former wanted to know 
merely how to keep alive on earth; but the latter desired 
rather to know the answer to the question why. Even 
the exploited pleb sweating in the slums of Rome was 
advanced enough to wonder what it was all about. Why 
was he here on earth? Where was he going? What did 
it all mean anyway? . . 

And therein lies the one truly fundamental advance 
marking the development of religion in the ancient 
world. The whole impulse to believe took on a changed 
character. Men were no longer driven to the gods by 
the common animal hunger for self-preservation; they 
were moved rather by the high human yearning for self- 
pacification. 

And that was no slight advance. . . . 

















































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IV. 


BOOK THREE 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 


BRAHMANISM 


1: The primitive Aryan gods—the Vedas. 2: The Aryans 
move to the Ganges—caste—the brahmins. 3: The Upanishads 
Sten Over-Soul—transmigration—Nirvana—the growth of 
asceticism. 


JAINISM 


1: Mahavira—his gospel. 2: How the gospel of Mahavira was 
corrupted—Jainism today. 


BUDDHISM 


1: The story of Gautama. 2: His gospel—its implications— 
the Law of Karma. 3: How Gautama spread his gospel. 4: 
Early history of Buddhism—deification of Buddha—Asoka— 
the new Buddhism in China—Tibet—Japan—India-—Ceylon. 


HINDUISM 


1: The dominant religion in India today—caste—the trinity— 
the divisiveness in Hinduism. 2: Vishnu—the avatars—the 
Bhagavad-Gita—Krishna—theology in Vishnuism. 3: Shiva— 
his popularity—the Tantra—sex in religion. 4: Hindu philos- 
ophy—yoga—the mystic ecstasy. 5: The religion of the 
lower classes. 


118 


BOOK THREE 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 
I. BRAHMANISM 


fa ,O ONE can say for certain, but it 
f seems probable that before the 
first white man entered India, the 
land was populated entirely by a 
snub-nosed, black-skinned peo- 
ple. By what means those black 
savages tried to cope with the 
universe, by what illusions they 
tried to make their life livable, 
no one knows. Nor does anyone 
know, save very vaguely, the na- 
ture of India’s religion even during the first centuries 
after the coming of the white man. ‘The first white 
invaders of India belonged to what is loosely termed 
the Aryan race: the stock that also produced the 
Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, and most 
of the other peoples of Europe. About four or five 
thousand years ago they broke through the passes of the 
Hindu Kush Mountains, and then settled down in the 
fertile valley of the Indus. They were warriors and 
shepherds, a crude, simple folk who seemed to be only 
slightly less uncivilized than were the black men whom 
they drove before them. Their religion was a low fear 
of many spirits, among them being ‘“‘three and thirty 
119 








120 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


gods’’ who were worshipped with oblations of beer— 
soma it was called—on a spread of straw. It was, 
therefore, an advanced form of animism, a nature-wor- 
ship in which the more important spirits were no longer 
thought to animate mere sticks or stones but rather vast 
phenomena such as the sun and the sky. 

The most important of these spirits was one called 
Indra, usually pictured as a_ boasting, gluttonous, 
drunken brawler controlling the wind and the rain. 
Besides him there were several other deities who had 
most seriously to be reckoned with: Dyaush Pitar (re- 
lated to Zeus Pater and Jupiter), who was the sky-god; 
Asura, the “Wise Spirit of Heaven’; Agni, the god of 
fire (the Sanskrit name is related to our English word 
“agnite’); Mithra, a sun-god (the remote ancestor, of 
course, of the Roman mystery-god Mithras); Soma, 
the principle of intoxication become a god; and various 
others. 

Certain of these gods the Aryan invaders must have 
brought with them from the unknown cradle-land 
whence they had come; others quite clearly must have 
been developed in the new home. Most of them, how- 
ever, must have been worshipped only by single tribes, 
for so soon as the tribes began to merge, many of those 
gods disappeared. From early times there seems to 
have been a steady drift in Aryan India toward a syn- 
thesis, an amalgamation of the gods. 

In the beginning the means by which the Aryans 
courted the favor of these gods was exceedingly simple. 
‘The father of each family was the priest, and the mother 
was the priestess. There were no temples, and indeed 
no permanent holy places of any kind. . . . But what 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 121 


happened in the rest of the world soon happened also 
in India. In the hope of cajoling the gods more effec- 
tively, the ritual was gradually elaborated. “Then pro- 
fessional sacrificers arose—priests whose services at the 
altar were imagined to be somehow more efficacious 
than the services of ordinary men. And by these priests 
the ritual was elaborated and complicated still further. 
They created a vast literature of psalms and magic spells 
to recite at the altars in order to get a firmer hold on 
the gods—a literature still preserved in what are called 
the Vedas. “The word veda is related to the English 
word “‘wit,’’ and the German word “‘wissen.’’ Broadly 
interpreted it means ‘“‘knowledge,”’ but refers specifically 
to that sort of knowledge which will aid a man to win 
the protection of the gods. ‘There are more than a 
hundred books in existence which are called Vedas, but 
many of them are little known even to the most erudite 
scholars today. Of them all the oldest and most impor- 
tant is called the Rig Veda, a collection of over a thou- 
sand hymns which date back perhaps as far as 2000 B. c. 


2 


THIS Vedic literature—or much of it, at least—was 
developed while the Aryan population was still con- 
fined to the valley of the Indus. Many years passed in 
that fertile region before overcrowding forced the white 
men to penetrate further into the land; but then a heavy 
migration began southward toward the valley of the 
Ganges. ‘There it halted for a while, and there a new 
civilization arose. ‘The life of the Aryan took on an 
entirely new character in this changed environment. 
For one thing the distinctions between the various classes 


1Z2 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


of human beings had to be emphasized as never before. 
The white invaders grew terrified lest in time the identity 
of their stock might be lost in the welter of the far larger 
black population. It was the ancient hunger for self- 
preservation manifesting itself once more, the old, old 
hunger for continued life for the race as well as the indi- 
vidual. And to satisfy that hunger the Aryans resorted 
to the most desperate expedient imaginable. They raised 
up a towering religious and social barrier of caste to pro- 
tect themselves from the blacks. (In Sanskrit the one 
word varnu means both caste and color.) And across 
that barrier they forbade not merely intermarriage, but 
also every form of social and religious intercourse. 
White was white and black was black, and ne’er the 
twain were supposed to meet. . 

Of course, the expedient failed to accomplish its pur- 
pose, as we can see from the fact that all Hindus today, 
high-caste as well as low, are black. But though it 
failed utterly in that direction, it proved all too success- 
fulin another. ‘hough it could not keep whites physi- 
cally separated from blacks, it was soon all too effective 
in keeping whites socially separated from each other. 
For once the idea of caste took root in the land, it began 
to spread like a veritable plague. Soon it began to dis- 
tinguish not merely between whites and blacks, but also 
between white priests and white chieftains, and then be- 
tween white chieftains and white farmers, and finally 
between white farmers and white serfs. It was natural. 
of course, for the priests—the brahmins they were called 
—to emerge at the very top of this monstrous social 
system. As long as they alone were deemed able to 
placate and cajole the gods, so long were they alone able 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 123 


to command the highest respect of men. Even the 
rajahs, the princes, had to rank below them... . 

With great power there came as a matter of course 
the opportunity of acquiring great wealth. Riches liter- 
ally flooded into the coffers of the brahmins. From 
every sacrifice to the gods the priests were permitted to 
take no mean portion for themselves; and besides they 
did not scruple to accompany even their most poetic 
prayers and loftiest adorations with open bids for extra 
““‘bakhsheesh.” . . . And with great wealth came the 
opportunity of acquiring still greater power. In time 
the priests, not content with their supremacy over men, 
began to covet supremacy over the very gods. And 
they actually managed to achieve it, too! They began 
by exalting the importance of the ritual, saying: ‘“The 
whole world was created by the sacrificial rite; from the 
sacrificial rite the very gods are sprung. . . . Assuredly 
the sun would not rise if the priest did not make sacri- 
fice.’” And from that they went to exalting themselves, 
saying: *“The whole universe is subject to the gods, the 
gods to the spells, and the spells to the brahmins; there- 
fore the brahmins are our gods!’’ “They came to look 
upon the gods almost with disdain, and treated them 
like so many hungry tramps. “As the ox bellows for 
the rain,’’ they presumptuously declared in their holy 
Wiitwe soe yearns Indra’ for soma.’ . ... It wasa 
development which had mounted so outrageously high 
that it had toppled over into absurdity. 

Of course, such a religion could not hold sway forever. 
The masses, finding the protection afforded by the brah- 
min gods to be prohibitively costly, began to bargain 
instead for the much cheaper protection of unorthodox 


wae, THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


demons. Out of the depths of their ancient savage 
heritage, or from the slime of the black native animism 
around them, they dragged up scores of fell spirits to 
dread or cling to. . . . And in time the priests, too, 
began to question the sincerity of their over-ritualized 
religion. In the same Brahmanas, the ‘‘Priestlies,’’ in 
which the clerics dared to assert their claims as the lords 
of the religion, they also had to betray their lurking 
doubts as to the validity of the whole religion itself. Of 
course, they did not dare confess those doubts openly, 
for that would have cut the ground from beneath their 
own feet. It would have put an end to their inordinate 
power by destroying the whole system which gave it to 
them. So, as always happens when men no longer be- 
lieve but cannot afford openly to disbelieve, the brahmins 
tried to ease their consciences by developing an apolo- 
getic theology. With suspicious anxiety they tried to 
strip the ritual ceremonies of their obvious absurdity 
by interpreting them as beautiful symbols and allegories. 
Theology very frequently is no more than an effort to 
prolong the life of moribund ideas by reinterpreting 
words which no longer mean what they used to say— 
and when theology is that, it is invariably a confession 
of secret distrust and skepticism. Quite obviously 
whole sections of the Brahmanas were intended to be 
stout ropes of ingenious rationalism by which the priests 
might save themselves from drowning in doubt. 

But despite the stoutness of those ropes, and the craft 
with which they were plaited, they nevertheless failed 
to be of much avail. The priests went down. Down, 
down they went in the dark and muddy waters of doubt 
and dismay. With frozen fingers they still held on to 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 125 


the ropes, tugging at them again and again in vain effort 
to stay their sinking. But down they went neverthe- 
less, down, down until at last their feet touched bottom 
in the ooze of blackest pessimism. . 


3 


PERHAPS the physical conditions of life at the time 
had a share in this drowning of Vedic hopefulness. 
Things had profoundly changed since the old days in 
the valley of the Indus when the Vedas had been 
created. “The Aryans by now had become Hindus. 
Despite all the thickness of the wall of caste, the black 
blood of the aborigines had seeped into the veins of the 
white men. And synchronously with this coloring of 
the skin, the evil climate of the Ganges Valley had in- 
duced a darkening of the soul. A new spirit, a sepul- 
chral spirit of hopelessness, took possession of the erst- 
while white men. It found its expression in a new 
literature, a vast collection of philosophic tractates 
called the Upanishads, the ‘‘Seances.’’ It is difficult to 
say just when the Upanishads were written, but accord- 
ing to the best authorities it was probably during the 
two centuries stretching from about 800 B. C. to about 
600 B. c. Their burden was an entirely new under- 
standing of man’s chance of ever attaining rest in the 
universe. In the first place, they threw all the old gods 
and the old rites overboard, frankly confessing that they 
were quite without essential reality. Only one thing, 
they insisted, was real: the Brahma, the “‘Self,’’ the One 
Absolute, Infinite, Impersonal, Indescribable “‘It.’”’ And 
all deeds and words, all creatures, even all gods, were 
but fleeting manifestations of this “‘It.’’ As a logical 








126 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


consequence, therefore, there existed but one way by 
which man could ever attain ultimate peace. Obviously 
he had to lose himself in the “‘It.’”’ He had to cease 
being just a mere manifestation, and become at last an 
integral part of Brahma. 

Now all that was by no means unique. Many peoples 
other than the Hindus have at one time or another taken 
refuge in the thought that this world is but an illusion, 
and that salvation can be obtained only on some other 
plane of existence. But no other people ever carried that 
thought to so rigorous a length as did the Hindus. 
Most other folk halted with the hope that death would 
immediately open the door to salvation. They told 
themselves that, though life in this world was unutter- 
ably vain, death was approaching, and with it the assur- 
ance of real life in some other and more glorious world. 
But the Hindus could not cherish so easy a hope. Death 
seemed to them anything but a way out. In the dread 
valley of the Ganges, where existence meant perpetual 
struggle beneath a sun that seared one’s flesh and in an 
air that strangled one’s courage, even death did not hold 
out any immediate promise of peace. The fell idea of 
transmigration, of a weary round of endless life, had 
taken hold of the Hindus. Death seemed to them but 
the beginning of more of this same old torment which is 
earthly life. The souls of the dead might escape for a 
little while to the moon; but just as soon as the influence 
of their good deeds was exhausted, back they sank to the 
earth like so many spent balloons. And then they were 
reborn as persons or animals or even plants. If their 
preceding life had been extraordinarily good, on their 
return they became perhaps as much as princes or even 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA i27 


brahmins; but if they had done evil, then they returned 
to live as dogs or pigs or even slimy weeds at the edge 
of swamps. 

‘There seemed to be but one effectual way of escape 
from that terrible cycle of unending life, and that was by 
absorption into the “‘It.”’ If only.a man could annihi- 
late his individual self, could utterly destroy his little 
“it,” then at last could he be free of life and attain the 
release called Nirvana. Nirvana was not a place but a 
state of mind, and therefore it could be attained only by 
means of the mind. Mere acts, good or bad, could not 
help in the least; nor could even the very gods be of 
assistance. As the Upanishads explicitly declare: 
“Whoever thus knows ‘I am the Brahma!’ becomes the 
Brahma. Even the gods have no power to hold such a 
man from becoming thus, for he becomes their very 
Soul.”’ Therefore mere striving after moral perfection 
or even after ritual propriety could never win for man 
the blessedness of Nirvana; no, only the total abolition 
of striving itself could do it. For striving, desiring— 
that was the very source of all illusory life. To desire, 
to want, to cherish even the least flicker of a petty wish— 
that was the vicious stuff whereof the ever-reincarnating 
self was made. Without desire the individual “it” 
would be lost, and only the Brahma, the Over-Soul, the 
One Universal “‘It’’ would be left. So logically there 
was but one sane purpose left in life: to cease de- 
Sieinigdty, y) 

One wonders if this nihilistic philosophy of the Upan- 
ishads greatly influenced the life of the masses in India 
twenty-six hundred years ago. Probably it did not, for 
it must have been far beyond the comprehension of those 


en; 


ee SAW BH “tee aes 


Pak 


, AO SE trade 
Wifte>>* wo A 
“ip Rey 


Ss 





MEN FLED TO THE JUNGLES 
128 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA je 





masses. But that it profoundly affected the learned is 
quite beyond doubt. The desire to end desire simply 
ravished the higher classes in that day. Asceticism, the 
voluntary slaying of appetite in all its forms, became 
rife in every temple and princely court. Men fled away 
into the mountains and far into the jungles, there to live 
as anchorites and strangle every last vestige of normal 
desire. In incredible misery they dragged out their days, 
hungry but for one thing—the extinction of hunger. 
And then came the heresies. . . . 


II. JAINISM 


IT was inevitable that heresies should arise, once as- 
ceticism began to spread in old India. It may be laid 
down as an axiom that a man who does not live the 
life of the mob will not think its thoughts either. He 
cannot but become unorthodox in spirit as well as con- 
duct, looking out on life from an angle of his own, and 
drawing his own conclusions. [Therefore it was but 
natural for the advent of asceticism in India to be ac- 
companied by the advent of heterodoxy. In the sixth 
century B. C., India literally swarmed with heresies. 
Sects arose in a night and perished in a night; prophets 
were hailed and forgotten between the phases of a moon. 
Indeed, only two of all the movements initiated in that 
century endured long enough even for their names to be 
remembered. But those two endured well—passing 
Welly dy": 

The less important of those two was the sect now 
known as Jainism. Its founder was a young prince 
named Mahavira, a man who lived until the age of 
thirty the riotous life of an Indian rajah, and then of a 


130 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


sudden turned ascetic. “I shall for twelve years neglect 
my body,” he vowed; and, casting off his fine clothes, 
plucking out his hair in five handfuls, he went off into 
the jungles. And after those twelve years of self-denial 
had passed, he reached Nirvana. From then on he was 
called the Jina, the ‘“‘Conqueror,’’ for of all men he 
seemed the most thoroughly to have conquered every 
last form of human desire. And abandoning his soli- 
tude thenceforth, he began to go up and down the 
Ganges Valley to tell his fellow-men just how he had 
attained salvation. 

Now Mahavira was certain that he had become the 
Jina, the ‘‘Conqueror,’’ without the help either of the 
gods or the brahmins. He did not believe in the gods, 
and he scoffed at the very idea of prayer. ‘‘Man! Thou 
art thine own friend!”’ he cried. “‘Why shouldst thou 
crave a friend beyond thyself?’’ He derided the Vedas 
and decried the entire caste system. All he believed in 
was the willful annihilation of the self, the rigorous and 
unsparing destruction of every desire save the desire for 
no-desire. He demanded of his disciples that they do 
injury to no living thing, that they remain ever poor 
and ever meek. ‘‘Dish-water, barley-pap, cold sour 
gruel, water in which barley has been washed: such 
loathsome food the mendicants should never despise.”’ 
He forbade his followers to hate, and he also forbade 
them to love, for Mahavira considered the one as earth- 
binding as the other. And especially did he warn them 
against showing any favor to women. It is a pity we 
know so little that is authentic concerning the life of 
Mahavira, or we might be able to discover just what it 
was that made him so bitter a misogynist. Lust must 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 131 


naturally have been a frightful thorn in his spoiled 
princely flesh, and perhaps that was why he so unjustly 
branded woman as the cause of all sinful acts. He com- 
manded the true follower not to ‘‘speak of women, nor 
look at them, nor converse with them, nor claim them 
as his own, nor do their work.”’ 

But above all he forbade his monks to kill. ‘““This,”’ 
said Mahavira, “‘is the quintessence of wisdom: not to 
kill anything!’’ And of all the prohibitions, this was 
the one most scrupulously observed. Solicitude against 
destroying life—and life was thought to be not merely 
in man but also in animals, plants, even grains of dust— 
drove the followers of Mahavira to the most grotesque 
of excesses. Some of them sat immobile for years, re- 
fusing to stir a limb or even breathe deeply, lest thereby 
they destroy aught of those small insects with which 
the air of India swarms. ‘They refused to wash their 
teeth, or cleanse their clothes, or scratch their bodies 
when the vermin nipped them. ‘To this day they main- 
tain hospitals for animals, caring even for sick snakes 
and rats and even lice! . . . Only one form of destruc- 
tion was permitted: self-destruction. As death ap- 
proached, the holy Jain might make his one last effort 
to sunder the chain of transmigration by bravely crush- 
ing all desire for sustenance and starving himself to 
death! ‘Then at last he was free... . 


iz 


MAHAVIRA, the founder of Jainism, was born in 599 
B. Cc. and died in 529. According to tradition he 
preached untiringly during all the last thirty years of 
his life, and when he died he left many disciples to carry 


132 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


on his work. But those disciples were smaller men than 
the Jina, and at their hands his gospel came in for pro- 
found and sorry perversion. In the first place the per- 
sonality of the Jina was exalted until he was made out 
to be almost a god. Legends sprang up around his 
name, fantastic stories recounting the miracles attendant 
on his birth and death. And before many generations 
had passed he actually was declared to be a veritable 
god! ‘That gentle, quiet anchorite who had given more 
than half his life to preaching the worthlessness of gods 
and the futility of prayers was himself deified and prayed 
to. By the year 400 the Jains were already setting up 
idols of Mahavira, and building beautiful temples in 
which they burnt regular offerings of flowers and in- 
cense. Then, not satisfied with one god, the Jains 
created twenty-four other Jinas to adore. They said 
that Mahavira was only the last and greatest of a long 
line of divine ‘‘Conquerors,’’ and they surrounded his 
image with images of all the twenty-four others. Even 
then they were not satisfied, for later they added many 
female divinities to the pantheon. Century after century 
the people took up new gods and spirits to worship and 
cling to, until finally Jainism became almost as crudely 
polytheistic as the old Vedic religion it had once set out 
to reform. ‘The brave atheistic spirit in which Jainism 
had been conceived seeped out of it entirely, and the 
highest heresy preached by Mahavira was the one most 
flagrantly betrayed. 

Of course, that was all but inevitable. Once Jain- 
ism began to spread among the plain people, its first 
principles simply had no chance of surviving. Mahavira 
had preached a gospel utterly beyond the comprehen- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 133 
sion of ordinary men. He himself had been one of those 
mighty souls for whom the consciousness merely of 
living the right life was enough. He had not needed 
gods to cling to. Right Faith, Right Knowledge, and 
Right Living—called by him the ‘““Three Jewels’’—had 
by themselves been enough to win him salvation. ... 
But those who came after him were weaker men. In 
their blind eyes the Three Jewels seemed worthless with- 
out a setting in a tinsel plate of theology. ‘Those fol- 
lowers were not courageous enough to stake all on their 
own strength of will. They simply had to have gods 
foraidu thems) 4isc: 

But that was not the only issue in Mahavira’s gospel 
which his followers surrendered. Mahavira had revolted 
against the whole caste system, declaring that all men, 
low-caste as well as high, were equals once they entered 
the Sangha, the “‘Congregation.’’ But as soon as he 
died, that heresy died too, and before long even the 
very gods were divided into distinct social classes. Only 
the commandment against killing was not openly be- 
trayed; but as we have already seen its observance was 
carried to the absurdest extremes. Save for that, Jain- 
ism became hardly distinguishable from orthodox 
Hinduism. The religion took unto itself gods, idols, 
temples, priests, sacrifices—every one of the old means 
of salvation which Mahavira had most scornfully re- 
jected. . . . But what else was to be expected? After 
all, the common folk in India—like the common folk 
everywhere else in the world—-were (and are) still too 
weak to look to their own selves for salvation. “They 
needed reeds to cling to, gods to believe in. For they 
mreremcandsare) vatraid 1). iiafraidsd)). 


134 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


III. BUDDHISM 


BUT Jainism was only the less important of the two 
great heretical religions that arose in India in the sixth 
century B. Cc. When Mahavira was already almost forty 
years of age, there was born in India a male child 
destined to found the far greater religion of Buddhism. 
The name of this child was Siddharta Gautama, and 
his father was a wealthy rajah in the valley of the 
Ganges. Gautama in his birth was therefore strikingly 
like the man who founded the earlier heresy; and, as 
we shall see, in his life he was even more like him. At 
an early age Gautama too was married off to a beautiful 
princess; and until he was almost thirty he, too, reveled 
unrestrained in princely luxury. 

But then of a sudden something came over him. 
Exactly as had happened to Mahavira, a revulsion 
against pleasure took hold of this young prince so that 
he no longer could abide the lusts of the flesh. His eyes 
were suddenly opened to the unutterable misery of all 
life, and the sight so burnt its way into his soul that he 
nevermore could be at ease in his palace. One night 
he arose and, tiptoeing into the room where lay his 
sleeping wife with their new-born child in her arms, 
he took one last fond look at them both, and fled. Off 
into the night he sped, with his trusted charioteer by 
his side. Very far he rode, not halting until the rising 
of the sun had shown that he had already got far beyond 
the lands of his clan. “Then he dismounted, cut off his 
flowing locks, tore the jewels and ornaments from his 
clothes, and giving them together with his horse and 
sword to the charioteer, commanded that they be 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 135 


returned to his wife. Gautama himself did not go back, 
but turning his face toward the hills, he went off alone 
on foot. But even then he did not feel free. Not until 
he had exchanged clotkes with a beggar he met on the 
road did he feel himself loosed at last from all attach- 





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136 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


ments to the world of vanity. Not until he stood there 
on that dusty road a ragged vagrant without a possession 
on earth did he feel himself able at last to go forth undis- 
tracted in search of salvation. 

Southward Gautama took his way into a range of 
hills where dwelt certain hermits in caves. He had 
long known of these hermits, for their fame had spread 
throughout the countryside. They were not ordinary 
ascetics frantically starving their bodies, but rather 
devoted philosophers trying to enrich their minds. Most 
of their time was spent in the pursuit of knowledge— 
not knowledge about the facts of life, however, but 
about the destinies of the soul. “They did not poke about 
in laboratories as do our modern investigators; rather 
they sat under trees and talked. Long and earnestly they 
conversed about those metaphysical things our material 
world does not know. ‘Their great concern was how to 
lose themselves in the Brahma, in the universal Over- 
Soul which was the only reality they knew. They 
were sick of this futile, finite, tortured existence called 
life. “Chey wanted to cut away from it, cut clear away 
from the individual self and attain a sense of finality 
and security through absorption into the universal All. 
They craved release from the vicious round of trans- 
migrating life; they craved everlasting extinction. Eye- 
lids are heavy in the sweltering tropics, where the wet 
jungle heat breeds life too rankly; and these unhappy 
hermits wanted to sleep—to sleep forever. And because 
Gautama, too, wanted to sleep forever, he joined him- 
self to their company. And Gautama came and took 
part in their conversation. 

But the wandering prince did not tarry with them 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 137 


long. His mind was keen, and it took little time for 
him to discover how empty was the ratiocination of 
those talky hermits. They tried to drag their petty souls 
to Brahma by strings of words—but Brahma Itself, he 
discovered, was also a mere thing of words. He saw 
through all the arguments, no matter how smoothly 
and plausibly they were put, and he realized that 
Brahma, the great “‘It,’’ was essentially no more real 
than man, the little “‘it.’”’ So, taking five of the hermits 
with him, he went off into the jungles to try another 
road to salvation. With all his being he now gave him- 
self up to years of self-mortification, striving, as had 
Mahavira before him, to reach Nirvana through pain. 
For six years—at least, so we are told—-he practiced 
austerities the like of which had never before been seen 
in the land, living on a grain of rice a day, or on a single 
sesamum seed. But, unlike Mahavira, no success at- 
tended his efforts. Despite all Gautama’s austerities, 
those six years were “‘like time spent striving to tie the 
air into knots.’’ So finally he gave up the vain struggle. 
He had to confess to himself at last that senseless and 
irrational self-affliction was not enough. In despair he 
had to admit that the dismal path of mere denial could 
never be for him the way to peace. 

And so once more Gautama set off alone, far unhap- 
pier now than ever before. He had tried the ordinary 
life of the prince, and it had left a taste as of ashes in 
his mouth. He had tried the life of the philosopher, and 
that too had brought him no peace. And then he had 
tried the life of the ascetic, only to find that even in that 
there could be no release. So now he was lost, utterly 
at sea on a night that seemed to hold no faintest gleam 
of light, no slightest promise of dawn. 





138 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


And then of a sudden light broke on him. He was 
seated one day beneath a banyan tree, his spirit at its 
lowest ebb, when all without warning salvation came 
to him. In an instant his spirit leaped up in ecstasy; his 
whole being became suffused with joy. He felt himself 
released at last, released from life and the fear of life. 
He felt himself free at last, free and safe and secure. 


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BUDDHA WAS SEATED BENEATH A BANYAN TREE 


. . . For a day and a night, so tradition declares, he 
continued beneath that tree, sitting there and pondering 
on the wondrous thing that had happened to him. Then 
he arose to his feet, and went off to tell men what he 


had learnt. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA No he, 
2 


IN essence what Gautama had learnt was the folly | 
of all excess. It had come to him in that moment of | 
illumination that it was just as stupid to go mad with 
pain as it was to get drunk with pleasure. He had 
suddenly come to see that asceticism inevitably overshot 
its mark, that it missed the very thing it was after be- 
cause it went after it too wildly. He had discovered 
that the frantic excess with which the ascetics strove to 
curb desire meant only that they were letting desire 
run away with them. . . . So Gautama came forward 
with a new gospel which he called the Four Truths. 
They were these: First, both birth and death bring 
grief, and life is utterly vain. ‘““IThe waters of the four 
great oceans,’ he declared, “‘are naught compared with 
the tears of men as they tread the path of life.’’ Sec- 
ondly, the vanity of life is caused altogether by the 
indulgence of desire. “Therefore, thirdly, the vanity can 
end only with the ending of all desire. But fourthly— 
and herein lay the whole originality of the gospel—all 
desire can be ended not by excessive asceticism but by 
sane and intelligent. decency! The road to salvation, 
according to Gautama, was therefore not the tortuous 
trail of bodily self-destruction, but rather the ‘‘Middle 
Path” of spiritual self-control. It was the Eightfold 
Noble Path of “Right Belief, Right Resolve, Right 
Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, 
Right Thought, and Right Meditation.’’ Nirvana was, 
after all, not a physical condition but a state of mind, 
and therefore it could be reached not through physical 
torment but mental discipline. The blessedness of 





ical, THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


freedom, of everlasting passionless peace, of Nirvana, 
could be attained only by destroying the three cardinal 
sins: sensuality, ill will, and stupidity. 

Now the implications of such a gospel were grave 
and revolutionary beyond words. In the first place, 
they left no room whatsoever for gods, priests, or 
prayers. ‘“‘Who is there that has ever seen Brahma face 
to face?’’ cried Gautama scornfully. Or with regard 
to prayer: ‘“‘Could the farther bank of the river 
Akirvati come over to this side no matter how much a 
man prayed it to do so?”’ Thus it scouted the whole 
sacrificial system of the brahmins. It condemned out- 
right that shameless ritualization of morality which the 
priests had introduced with their Brahmanas. Indeed, it 
condemned not alone zitual but religion itself—that is, 
in its narrower connotation. Gautama’s gospel coun- 
tenanced none of those common instruments—gods, 
sacrifices, priests, or prayers—wherewith the religious 
technique is always practiced. . . . But in the broader 
connotation of the term, the gospel was itself a reli- 
gion. It tried desperately to find a way of escape from 
the insecurities of life, and to that extent it was most 
generously a religion. It tried earnestly to rid man of 
fear, to make him feel at home in the universe—and 
for that reason it deserves its chapter in the story of 
this believing world. ... 

But opposition to the gods was not the only radical 
implication of Gautama’s gospel. A second and perhaps 
just as radical implication was its opposition to all caste 
divisions. According to Gautama there were no valid 
distinctions between high-born and low-born, for men 
could be judged only according to their deeds. Very 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA he 


explicitly he declared: “‘A man does not become a 
brahmin by his family or by birth. In whom there is 
truth and righteousness—he is blessed, he is a brahmin. 
O fool, if within thee there is ravening, how can’st 
thou make the outside pure?’’ Gautama, who had be- 
longed to the princely caste, realized all too well how 
empty were all distinctions of birth. “Though born and 
reared in a palace, life for him had been no whit less 
futile and troubled than the life of the lowest serf in his 
wattle-and-daub hut. So how could he respect the 
trumpery social distinctions of the brahmins? 

But the revolt against the gods and the revolt against 
the castes were neither of them unique to Gautama’s 
gospel. Mahavira had urged them just as emphatically 
when Gautama was still a child in arms. What alone 
was original in the younger heresy was the emphasis 
Gautama laid on social ethics. Mahavira had insisted 
that each man could attain salvation for himself by going 
off alone and afflicting his own body. But the younger 
prophet declared that all individualism was sinful, and 
that one’s own salvation could be found only in the 
effort to bring salvation to every one else. ‘Go ye 
now, he commanded his followers, ‘‘out of compassion 
for the world and the welfare of gods and men... 
and preach the doctrine which is glorious.’’ And thus 
he cut at the very root of selfishness. One’s own peace, 
he declared, could be found only in seeking peace for all 
Hioanitys) <6. 

Now Gautama arrived at that conclusion from a 
rather startling and original premise. Unlike all other 
Hindu thinkers of his day, he did not believe in the 
individual soul. Just as some modern psychologists 


142 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


claim the soul to be no more than the name for a certain 
class of subtle muscular reactions, so Gautama claimed 
it to be no more than a name for the totality of human 
desires. As he himself put it: the chariot is made up 
of wheels, shaft, axle, carriage and banner-staff, and 
has no real existence when these are removed; and just 
so the soul is made up of desires and psychic tendencies, 
and disappears the moment. these are taken away. 
Therefore, argued Gautama, all this pother about the 
transmigration of souls was sheer folly. Only the 
deeds, not the doers, lived on from generation to gen- 
eration. So no matter how anxiously a man looked 
after what he called his soul, no whit of good could 
possibly result from it. Only if a man diligently 
watched his deeds could he possibly attain salvation. 
For there was an inexorable Law of Karma, an inescap- 
able ‘‘law of the deed,’ in the universe. The effects 
of all actions lived on perpetually, good breeding good, 
and evil breeding evil. And these effects could never be 
eluded. ‘‘Not in the sky, nor in the midst of the sea, 
not in the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot 
where a man can be freed from an evil act.’’ So every 
man’s fate depended not on what he was but what he 
did. Only if he did that which was righteous in the 
eyes of men, only then could he throw off the ball and 
chain of evil consequence and attain the blessed release of 
Witvanes swe 


3 


SUCH in brief was Gautama’s gospel after the revela- 
tion came to him beneath the banyan tree. He sought 
to communicate it first to the five disciples whom he had 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 143 


left behind when he forsook asceticism. But these men 
looked on him as an apostate, and would not even 
receive him on his return. Only after much persistence 
could Gautama get them to give ear to his doctrine, 
and then he had to argue with them five days long. But 
in the end he won them over. With one accord those 
five men then hailed him as the Buddha, the ‘‘Enlight- 
ened One,’”’ for they had become convinced that he could 
not but be another of those chosen souls, the Buddhas 
(in Jainism they were called the Jinas), who from 
time to time were supposed to descend into the world 
to speak celestial truth. And then a little holy brother- 
hood was created around the person of this new 
Buddha. 

India was then swarming with restless souls in search 
of a faith that might comfort them; many of these 
came and found it in the words of Gautama. They 
gathered in the Deer Forest near Benares, and built 
themselves little huts around the dwelling-place of the 
Buddha. And when they were as many as sixty in 
number, their master commanded them to go forth dur- 
ing the dry months of the year and carry his comforting 
message to the people. He told them to carry abroad 
the good tidings that salvation was free, and that all 
men, high and low, learned and ignorant, could surely 
attain it if only they practiced justice and righteousness. 

Buddha himself went out into the country with that 
evangel. For twenty years he wandered far and wide, 
winning disciples wherever he moved. Early in his 
ministry he went back to his own home, and there 
converted his long-deserted wife and son to the 
new faith. (His son even became one of his preaching 





144 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


monks, and his wife joined an order of Buddhist nuns 
Which was soon organized.) And thus, the center of 
an ever-growing movement, Siddharta Gautama, the 
Buddha, lived out his days on earth. To the end he 
continued to instruct the disciples that gathered during 
every rainy season in the Deer Forest near Benares. 
Indeed, the very last words he uttered were addressed 
to them. ‘“‘Work out your own salvation!’’ he told 
them with his last breath. And then he died. ... 

More than twenty-four hundred years have passed 
since Siddharta Gautama passed away, and it is not 
easy for us to appreciate how revolutionary his doctrine 
must have been when first he uttered it. Never before 
had it been said in India that salvation was obtainable 
in any wise save through scrupulous sacrificing, or pro- 
found philosophizing, or extravagant asceticism. In 
other words, never before had it been asserted that those 
who were too poor to offer sacrifices, too dull-witted to 
indulge in philosophy, or too human to set up as an- 
chorites, could possibly be saved. Only when Gautama 
the Buddha took the field was that assertion made. 
Until then salvation, and even the hunger for salvation, 
had been deemed privileges open only to the few. But 
with the coming of Gautama they were held out to 
the many—to all. According to him even the lowliest 
in the land could attain Nirvana, if only they followed 
the Noble Eightfold Path. . . . And though that gos- 
pel was afterward distorted and corrupted and changed 
out of all likeness to what it had been when it came 
fresh from the lips of the Buddha, nevertheless it did 
endure and spread until its light was known over all 
the East. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 145 


4 


BUT his gospel did not spread at once. For years 
Buddhism remained an obscure and unimportant sect, 
probably just one of many heretical movements fer- 
menting away in the troubled India of those centuries. 
For a while it was no more than a mere ascetic order 
similar to Jainism. ‘The very selfishness which Gautama 
had most bitterly attacked, took hold of his professed 
followers, and they became far more concerned about 
the peace of their own little souls than the peace of all 
mankind. But about the third century B.C. there 
came a revival of Buddha’s world-saving spirit, and 
monks once more went out to preach a gospel in his 
name. 

Only now it was no longer the simple ethical gospel 
of Gautama. ‘Theology had crept in, and it became a 
religion in the very narrowest sense of that word. ‘Time 
had dealt hard with the memory of Gautama, and by 
the third century he was no longer imagined to have 
been a man but a god. A new school of Buddhist 
thought called the Mahayana, the “Greater Vehicle,”’ 
arose, and according to its teaching Buddha had been 
from the beginning a divine being. ‘The earlier school, 
the Hinayana or “Lesser Vehicle,’’ had been content 
to picture Gautama as altogether a human creature. It 
had frankly told in its writings how the master had 
occasionally suffered from wind on the stomach, and 
how once when he ate a meal prepared by a blacksmith 
he was attacked by dysentery and almost died. But the 
new school was totally incapable of such realism. It 
told instead how the Blessed One had been conceived 
supernaturally and had been born without pain. It 


146 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


described him as a sinless being who had been sent from 
heaven as the savior of gods and men. It further de- 
clared that his divine spirit continued regularly to re- 
turn to the earth, incarnating itself generation after 
generation in certain exceptionally holy men called 
Bodhisattvas, “‘Living Buddhas.’’ And thus it opened 
a way for the incursion of a whole troop of extra gods. 
And finally it allowed idols of Buddha to be set up in 
splendid temples, and even encouraged the offering of 
sacrifices of flowers to those idols. Just the very ele- 
ments in the old Brahmanic religion against which 
Buddha had most directly rebelled came sidling over 
to the protestant faith, and through the Mahayana took 
possession of it. 

And now, bedizened with idols and made colorful 
with myths, Buddhism began to spread at last. Power 
and riches began to flow to the sect, and before long 
the tiny huts in which the preachers had been wont to 
shelter themselves during the rainy season were replaced 
by imposing and costly monasteries. The rajahs of 
India were just then struggling to wrest supremacy for 
themselves from the hands of the long-dominant priestly 
caste; and these rajahs began to see the value to their 
cause of this virile caste-destroying movement. Espe- 
cially did one of them, a certain low-caste adventurer 
named Chandraguptra, see its usefulness. By war and 
intrigue he had managed to carve out for himself a vast 
empire in northern India, and because the anti-caste 
doctrine of Buddhism promised to help him retain his 
power, he endowed its monasteries with vast estates and 
enormous riches. And his grandson, the famous King 
Asoka who became emperor of India in 264 B. c., 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 147 


devoted a great share of his energy during all his reign to 
the spreading of the Buddhist religion. 

Asoka is esteemed by many scholars to have been 
the noblest monarch in history; and if the criterion is 
the number of souls that still revere his memory, then 
certainly he was a far greater figure than any other in 
the whole world’s catalogue of kings. By acquiring 
one state after another he built up an empire that in- 
cluded a large part of the East; and every inch of it he 
won by faith and not by the sword. Asoka sent out 
Buddhist missionaries to Ceylon, to Kashmir, and to 
the uttermost ends of the earth known to him. Eight 
and twenty years he carried on his far-flung missionary 
work, and before he died he had managed to make 
Buddhism the dominant religion in his half of the world. 

But of course it was not the simple ethical gospel 
of Gautama that was carried to these strange lands. 
Rather it was an intricate theological dogma that trans- 
lated Buddha into a God. Gautama had preached a 
religion of morality; but these successful missionaries 
rather preached a religion that made a morality of 
ritual. Mere obeisance to the god Buddha was deemed 
enough to save one’s soul. Nirvana, which to Gautama 
had been entirely a state of spiritual peace attained by 
following the Noble Eightfold Path, was now inter- 
preted to be a physical post-mortem heaven won by 
much kissing of an ikon’s toe. And these corruptions 
were marked not merely in the Mahayana school of 
Buddhism which spread to China and Japan, but later 
also in the Hinayana school which throve especially in 
Ceylon. The farther Buddhism traveled, the more it 
changed. On the northwestern frontier of India, where 


148 THIS BELIEVING WORLD | 


the Hellenic and Hindu worlds touched, the Buddhist 
idols came to look exactly like the idols of the West. 
Hariti, a pestilence-goddess whom Buddha was sup- 
posed to have converted, was carved to look very much 
like Isis, the mother-goddess of Egypt. She was even 
pictured as holding the infant Buddha to her breast, 
exactly as Isis held the infant Horus and—much later— 
Mary held the Christ Child. 

In China Buddhism took on much of the character 
of ‘Taoism, and in Japan it was greatly influenced by 
the national religion called Shinto. “Then contact with 
Christianity began to have its effect, first through the 
efforts of the early Nestorian preachers, and much later 
through the activities of Protestant missionaries. 
Buddhism in Thibet very early took on a distinct Chris- 
tian coloring, accepting into its ritual such Christian 
symbols and instruments as the cross, the miter, the 
dalmatica, censer, chaplet, and holy-water font. The 
Buddhist religion in Thibet has developed a most elab- 
orate hierarchical system, with a pope, the Dalai Lama, 
ruling the whole land from his palace at Lhassa, assisted 
by bishops and priests officiating in vast cathedrals clut- 
tered with images and pictures, and by myriads of monks 
busily spinning prayer-wheels in high-walled monas- 
teries. And also in Japan Buddhism has more recently 
taken on Christian coloring, though here of a Protestant 
shade. Modern Japanese Buddhists are reported to have 
congregational worship and hymn-singing, Sunday 
Schools for their children, a Young Men’s Buddhist © 
Association for their men, and Buddhist temperance 
societies for their women! ... 

In India itself, Buddhism simply withered and died 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA LA9 


out. A thousand years after the death of Gautama, it 
had become very largely Brahmanized. ‘The plain 
people fearfully cried to the idols for help, and the 
leaders earnestly wrangled about the proper size and 


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HOW BUDDHISM SPREAD 


cut of their ceremonial robes. When therefore a new 
religion, Islam, invaded the land, it swept all before it. 
Although there are perhaps a hundred and fifty million 
Buddhists in Asia, no more than two thousand of them 
now remain in all of India. 

Buddhism is still the religion of Burmah, Siam, and 
Ceylon, but in those lands it has fallen back almost to 
sheer animism. Everywhere in Ceylon one can hear the 
bellman at sundown calling the naked brown folk with 
glossy black hair to the service in the temple. ‘They 


150 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





bring candles—if they can afford them—and flowers 
to the yellow-clad priest; and the latter solemnly offers 
them to some fetish, perhaps a putative tooth of 
Buddha, nestling in an innermost shrine. “Then there 
is much praying—praying to gods, devils, angels, de- 
mons, saints, and all manner of other spirits. . . . And 
all the while there stands within that land a mighty 
tree whose seed came from the very banyan under which 
Gautama received the revelation. ‘There in Ceylon it 
still stands, the oldest tree known to history. During 
nearly twenty-two hundred years it has been tenderly 
watched and watered; its branches have been stoutly 
braced, and its soil has been terraced to give room for 
the gigantic roots to grow. And there it thrives still 
today, a pitilessly ironic monument to the pitiful stu- 
pidity of man. For that tree, a mere thing in nature, 
has been most carefully preserved and nurtured, while 
the faith which alone gave it meaning, long, long ago 
was allowed to perish. .. . 


IV. HINDUISM 


BUT despite the rising of Jainism and Buddhism in 
India, the old priestly religion rooted in the Vedas was 
never completely ousted. Even though for a while it 
lost the favor of the rulers, never for a moment did it 
lose its attractiveness to the ruled. Of course, inwardly 
it changed from century to century, taking on new gods 
and forgetting old ones, acquiring strange rites and 
neglecting native ones; but at least in its caste structure 
and priestly character the old religion of the Hindus 
never wavered from first to last. At the present time 
well over two hundred million souls in India—more 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA Jai 


than the number of Protestant Christians in all the 
world—still call themselves Hinduists! 

To define Hinduism is very nearly impossible. 
Actually it is not so much a religion (in the narrower 
sense of the word) as a religio-social system. Although 
Hinduism contains a whole farrago of theologies, phi- 
losophies, and sacrificial systems, nevertheless its one 
dominant note is that of caste. An elaborate tissue of 
ancient religio-social laws has hardened until by now 
it seems altogether indestructible. ‘“[hat tissue was first 
built up by a series of law codes, most prominently the 
Code of Manu, which were compiled about the time the 
Buddhist heresy was at its height. “These codes set out 
to do for Hinduism what the Talmud in a later day 
did for Judaism. They tried to build a wall of law 
around the faith so that none could stray from it. Of 
course, the stoutest buttresses of the Hindu wall were 
naturally the caste distinctions, and these therefore re- 
ceived the most careful attention of the law-makers. 
‘The superiority of the brahmins and the inferiority of 
the laborers were declared to be ordered in heaven ac- 
cording to a divine plan “‘for the prosperity of the 
world.’’ A man’s caste, like his breath, was with him 
incessantly from birth to death; indeed, unlike his 
breath, it was even supposed to follow him into the 
grave. 

But save for these laws regulating caste there is no 
other unifying element in all Hinduism. There are 
two major sects in the religion, and at least fifty-seven 
sub-sects, each seeking to attain salvation with the aid 
of its own gods and ceremonies. Christianity, which 
is even more intensively divided, is at least united by its 


Lie, THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


unanimous recognition of the uniqueness of Jesus. Hin- 
duism has no such common doctrine. It is true that 
about 300 A.D. an attempt was made to create such a 
doctrine by combining the three main Hindu gods into 
a universally acceptable trinity; but the attempt failed 
dismally. Brahma, the chief god in that trinity, never 
became popular save with the priests and philosophers. 
He was not nearly concrete enough a deity for the plain 
folk to grasp and believe in, and there are now only two 
temples in all India that are devoted to his worship. 
And Vishnu and Shiva, the two other gods in the 
trinity, always remained distinct and separate, continu- 
ing to attract distinct and separate followings. ... 
But though Hinduism has never been united on any 
creed or rite, its divisiveness has rarely if ever led to 
bloodshed. Unlike the Christians, who again and again 
have resorted even to wholesale slaughter in order to ex- 
tirpate all heresy, the Hindus have rarely persecuted 
divergence of faith. They have been wise enough to 
see that each man has a right to worship as he himself 
sees fit, and that no man is justified in seeking to force 
his doctrine on his neighbor. “Therefore the worshippers 
of Vishnu and those of Shiva have dwelt side by side for 
centuries without bitterness, and countless sub-sects have 
arisen and disappeared in India with very little violence 
or acrimony. No matter how many evils may be debited 
against Hinduism, at least this one virtue must be listed 
to its! credit:7it 18 tolerantiy.s< 


2 


ONE of the two most popular gods in India today is 
Vishnu. Originally a minor Yedic sun-god, he has 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 153 


since risen to superlative importance largely because he 
has been credited with the power of incarnating himself 
occasionally in human form. One can easily understand 
why that propensity should have made Vishnu attrac- 
tive to the people. “Through those periodic incarna- 
tions—those “‘avatars’” as they are called—-Vishnu be- 
came real, tangible, almost human to all sorts of Hindu 
people. The trouble with a god like Brahma, for 
instance, was that he was no more than a cold, 
impersonal, philosophical deduction—a blank. But 
there was no such chill impersonality about Vishnu. On 
the contrary, he was believed to share in every joy and 
sorrow of his followers, and their distress and sin were 
supposed to be his incessant concerns. It was said, in- 
deed, that whenever the people became wayward Vishnu 
was so solicitous that he actually came down to earth 
in human form and himself led the way to reforma- 
tion. Many epics were written to tell how the god 
had thus incarnated himself as a man and worked great 
wonders. Indeed, two of those epics, the Mahabharata 
and the Ramayana, form the final and most popular 
chapter in all of Hindu sacred literature. | 

The Mahabharata tells the adventures of Vishnu in- 
carnated in the body of a great hero named Krishna, 
and in it is to be found that famous tractate called the 
Bhagavad-Gita, the ‘‘Song of the Adorable.’’ This 
little tractate, which has often been called the New Tes- 
tament of Hinduism, has been translated and distributed 
by societies with just the same missionary zeal where- 
with tract associations distribute the Bible. Actually 
the Bhagavad-Gita is an exceedingly confused and repe- 
titious little work, and one greatly marred by bewilder- 


154 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


ing inconsistencies. Perhaps that 1s why it has been 
so popular, for in its frequent stretches of vagueness 
and confusion one can find confirmation of almost any 
belief on earth. One can say of it as the Rabbis said 
of the Bible: ‘““Turn it over and over, for in it is every- 
thing.’’ But, despite all that, the Bhagavad-Gita is a 
work of rare grandeur. In spiritual tone and exalted 
ethical import it is hardly inferior to any other scripture © 
in the world. Nowhere is a nobler note struck than 
this one which rings out in the “‘Song of the Adorable’’: 
“He who does all his work for my (Vishnu’s) sake, 
who is wholly devoted to me, who loves me, who is 
free from attachment to earthly things, and without 
hate to any being, he enters into me.’ .. . 

Krishna, the god-man, whose adventures are celebrated 
in the Mahabharata and whose wisdom is set down 
in the Bhagavad-Gita, is considered the most important 
of Vishnu’s avatars. Indeed, in the hearts of millions 
of Hindus today he has actually come to occupy the 
place of Vishnu himself. Just as many Christians turn 
to Christ much more frequently than to God, so do 
many Hindus bow to Krishna rather than Vishnu. And 
it has been suggested that Krishna—whose name in 
some of the northern dialects is pronounced Krishto— 
may bear some significant relationship to Christ. That 
theory, however, cannot be substantiated by facts. In 
all probability Krishna and Christ are akin only to the 
extent that both arose out of a similar passion of the 
human race: the passion that sublimates its hero until 
it has made him more than mortal and has exalted him 
to the skies. It may be that originally Krishna was a 
beloved tribal chieftain and religious reformer who dur- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 155 


ing his lifetime taught his people to worship a god 
called Bhagavata, ‘“‘Adorable.’’ So wondrous a char- 
acter may he have been that after he died his followers 
were not able to resist thinking he had actually been 
the god himself. “Therewith arose the cult of Krishna, 
the man-god; and as soon as it grew powerful the 
priests of the old order shrewdly threw a cloak of Brah- 
man orthodoxy over it by saying Krishna was none 
other than an incarnation of their old god Vishnu. . . . 

That, however, is mere speculation. All we know 
for certain is that somehow the people did begin to 
believe that the god Vishnu from time to time came to 
earth in the form of avatars. Krishna was only one 
of these. Rama, whose exploits are detailed in the epic 
called the Ramayana, was almost as great; and innu- 
merable chieftains, milk-men, even elephants and tigers, 
are included in the long list of lesser avatars. And 
because the people thus humanized Vishnu, they could 
believe in him with great intensity. “They could look 
upon him as a spirit enshrined in their own human 
hearts, one that guided their own souls and ultimately 
snatched them out of the cycle of life in order to carry 
them up to heaven. At least, so could and did the people 
consider Vishnu—before the theologians appeared. 
Once the latter came on the scene, however,: the nude 
innocence of the popular doctrine was immediately hid- 
den beneath thick folds of words. “Terms were defined 
and redefined, and at once schisms resulted. Acute con- 
troversies were started over the very idlest questions. 
To this day all followers of Vishnu are divided into two 
denominations because of a dispute as to whether man 
is saved by Vishnu as a new-born kitten or a new- 


156 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


born monkey is saved by its mother. “The new-born 
kitten acts helpless and its mother has to grasp it by the 
nape of its neck to carry it off to safety; but the new- 
born monkey lends a hand in its own rescue, clinging 
to its mother with all the strength of its little arms. (In 
essence we have here those old antagonists, Predestina- 
tion and Free-Will.) Even now that theological con- 
flict rages, dividing the Vishnuites into two camps: 
those who believe in the “‘cat-hold’’ theory, and those 
who are strong for the “monkey-grip” belief! ... 


3 


BUT Vishnu, even with the aid of all his avatars, 
never managed to attract so vast a following as did 
the third god of the trinity: Shiva. Originally this 
Shiva may have been one of those gruesome demons that 
had been conjured up in the fear-fevered heads of the 
black aborigines, and that were still worshipped even 
after the coming of the Aryans. He was (and some- 
times still is) conceived to be a wild, morose deity, 
malevolent and destructive, causing pestilence, storms, 
and all manner of other horrors; and he is commonly 
depicted as a monster bearing a trident and rosary. 
(Christians did not learn of the rosary until they ob- 
served its use during the Crusades among the Moslems; 
but the Moslems themselves had only a little earlier first 
taken to it as a sacred symbol in imitation of the fol- 
lowers of this god Shiva.) In the trinity by which 
the theologians tried to unite the Hindu sects, Brahma 
stood for the principle of Creation, Vishnu for that of 
Preservation, and Shiva for that of Destruction. Of the 
three, Shiva became and remained the most popular. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA Lb7, 


The masses loved him because he was very much their 
own kind: passionate, violent, and licentious. And 
with him they loved his sluttish wife, Parvata the Ter- 
rible. To her glory the Thugs, a secret sect of pious 
murderers, used to commit unspeakable outrages; and 
in her name the Tantrists, a secret sect of pious perverts, 
still indulge in indescribable sex orgies. 

There is hardly a vil- 
lage in all of India today 
where there is not at 
least one shrine shelter- 
ing the emblem of Shiva: 
an upright cylindrical 
block usually resting on 
a circular slab with a hole 
in its center. Curiously, 
the people do not seem 
to realize the crude sym- 
bolism of that emblem, 
and do not even remotely 
associate it with sex. 
Many of them even wear 
it as an emblem around 
their necks for good luck, 
or as a sign of their reli- 
gious devotion. Of 
course, sex does play a very real part in the worship 
of Shiva and his female counterparts. One denomina- 
tion called Tantra is built around the alluring theory 
that only by riotous indulgence in passion can man 
ever cross the region of darkness which keeps him 
from utter union with Shiva. Passion, it is admitted, 


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158 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


is poison; but the only antidote for this poison is more 
poison. ‘Therefore it is reasoned that only indulgence 
in the five vices that poison the soul of man—wine, meat, 
fish, mystical gesticulation with the fingers, and sex 
looseness—only veritable orgies of those five vices, can 
drive their poison out of the system and really purify 
the’soul!:. . . 

Now, scholars are not lacking who maintain that all 
religion is merely a form of sex expression; and they 
have not a little plausible argument to sustain their 
theory. It would be strange indeed if religion, which 
reaches down to the very depths of human consciousness, 
should not be greatly influenced by so pervading an im- 
pulse as sex. Indeed, it must be freely admitted that even 
the most advanced and civilized of religious practices 
are colored by sex. (But for that matter, so also are 
the most advanced and civilized of art forms and social 
systems. ) 

The religious practices of India, however, are, for 
the most part, far from being advanced and civilized, 
and it is therefore the more natural that sex should 
obtrude itself in them. Indulgence in erotic practices 
is part of the worship not alone of Shiva, but also of 
Vishnu. It is said that many of the minor sects adoring 
Krishna really adore his wife or mistress, or draw their 
inspiration from the wild tales that the Mahabharata 
tells of Krishna’s dissipated youth. One must remember 
that the average worshipper of Vishnu, like his fellow 
in the Shivaite sect, is still a relatively primitive man. 
He is still hungry for those animalic delights which 
alone seem to make his wretched life livable. . . . 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 159 


4 

BUT though Hinduism among the low-caste folk has 
remained revoltingly primitive, among the high-caste 
philosophers it has advanced until certain of its teachings 
are almost beyond comprehension. “The Hindus as a 
people seem to be equipped with a deep and definite 
tendency to think rather than to act. Perhaps because 
of the enervating climate in their land they are much 
more given to hard labor in contemplation and medita- 
tion than to hard labor in conquering and creating with 
tools and machines. As a result their highest achieve- 
ments have been in the realm of ideas rather than of 
concrete things. And the Western world, weary now 
of things and the frantic struggle to get them, has in 
recent decades come to take an inordinate interest in 
those mental achievements of the Hindus. Many 
Western souls too weak or too fine to stand the grind 
of our machine civilization have flung themselves with 
great—and often uncritical—enthusiasm into the pur- 
suit of various systems of Indian metaphysics. They 
have joined New Thought churches, Theosophical So- 
cieties, Leagues for the Contemplation of the Over-Soul;: 
or at least they have sat in fashionable drawing-rooms 
and listened entranced to the praise of one and another 
method of contemplation by turbaned yogi, swami, 
and other Hindu lecturers. 

But for all that, it is hardly possible that Indian 
thought will ever be able to take deep root in the West- 
ern world. At its heart there is a hunger quite incom- 
prehensible to the Western mind, the hunger for final 
death, for extinction, for utter release from the dread 
cycle of transmigrating life. To the Hindu thinker the 








160 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


bitterest woe in this woe-begotten life has always been 
the dread that there is no way out of life. Practically 
all of Hindu philosophy has been one protracted at- 
tempt to prove that there is indeed a way out. Accord- 
ing to Mahavira the Jina, the way out is through 
physical self-denial; according to Gautama the Buddha, 
it is through spiritual temperance and moral rectitude. 
But according to the orthodox Hindu philosophers, the 
way out is rather through various physical and psychic 
exercises. 

Most of these philosophers belong to the school 
known as “Yoga.”’ The Sanskrit word yoga is said to 
be related to the Latin jugum, and the English ‘‘yoke’’; 
and it means “‘union.’”’ Yoga aims to unite the indi- 
vidual soul with Brahma, the Universal Over-Soul, by 
the persistent suppression of all disturbing sense-activity. 
Various exercises which it provides enable a man to re- 
strain even the slightest unnecessary action of his body, 
leaving him immobile, transfixed, almost breathless. 
There he is to sit like a stone image, no tremor in his 
flesh, no lustre in his eyes, with his mind riveted in 
concentration on the Over-Soul. And then of a sudden 
the mystic marriage is consummated. ‘The little soul 
of the individual becomes suddenly at one with the 
great Over-Soul of the Universe. An ineffable bliss 
suffuses the devotee, a peace and rest such as he knew 
only in the womb of his mother. He feels himself 
somehow exquisitely exalted, deliciously carried out of 
himself, divinely disembodied. He becomes for a mo- 
ment entirely a spirit, an ethereal floating part of the 
All, a yogi. . . . And then the trance snaps. With a 
sickening horror in his slow-beating heart, the devotee 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 161 


comes sinking down to earth again. And there he 
awakes to find himself earth-bound once more—but 
with a memory he cannot obliterate. From then on he 
is a changed man, for having once tasted of Nirvana 
his one consuming passion is to taste again. From then 
on he is lost completely to the world, caring neither 
for its virtues nor its vices. From then on he goes 
wandering lonely as a cloud, not worrying whether he 
does good or evil, not thinking whether he builds or 
destroys. For he is no longer an ordinary man—he is 
a yogi! 

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of mys- 
ticism. No one can say with indisputable certainty 
just what it is, or whence it comes. “Theologians and 
most of the older psychologists insist that the mystic 
ecstasy experienced by the yogi or the saint is a veritable 
glimpse into eternity, and that it is a gift from God; 
the newer psychologists are inclined to believe it is no 
more than a sublimation of sex desire. But though we 
may not know what the mystic esctasy is or whence it 
comes, no one can deny that it is a valid and genuine 
phenomenon. ‘The fact that ninety-nine out of every 
hundred people who read this paragraph may never 
have experienced such an ecstasy does not in the least 
militate against its reality. Evidently there do exist 
in the world, especially in India, certain persons whose 
minds are peculiarly sensitive to what is loosely termed 
the spiritual. And when such persons heighten their 
sensitiveness by means of exercises like that of Yoga, 
it is no real cause for wonder if they experience the 
transcendent ecstasies whereof they tell. We ordinary 
mortals have hardly more right to challenge their testi- 


162 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


mony than we have right to challenge the testimony of 
astronomers who, with the increased sight afforded them 
by their telescopes, tell us of stars which our naked 
eyes have never seen. 

Besides, even if the mystic experience be indeed a 
delusion and a lie, all that matters is that to the mystic 
it seems the only indubitable truth. All of life’s earthly 
phenomena seem to him entirely illusory and unreal; 
only those fleeting moments of unearthly ecstasy seem 
to him to be valid and genuine. And in that faith he 
lives. Firm in the conviction that all the torments and 
hazards of earthly life are mere lies and fantasies, he can 
go through the world without fear. He can have no 
dread of this material universe because he tells himself 
it simply isn’t there—and means it. Matter does not 
exist for him. Only Brahma, the Over-Soul, the “‘It,” 
the Infinite Spirit—only that exists. His only concern 
is how to break jail out of this illusory world, and his — 
whole religion is directed toward that release. In es- 
sence the mystic’s religion is the technique by which 
he strives to rise to union with Brahma. It is, of course, 
in no wise like the ordinary religious technique. It lays 
no emphasis on prayer or sacrifice, for the Over-Soul 
is purely impersonal and cannot be moved by cajolery 
or petition. Nor does it lay any emphasis on morality, 
for since the Over-Soul is not concerned with this illu- 
sory material world, necessarily it cannot be interested 
in the goodness or badness of the illusory deeds per- 
formed in it. No, the religion, the technique of salva- 
tion, practiced by the Hindu mystic, lays emphasis only 
on certain psychic exercises. It demands only concen- 
tration, suppression of all sense activity, breathless medi- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 163 


tation—and then it guarantees Nirvana. It demands 
that all action be put to death, and then promises ever- 
lasting inaction. And millions of souls in India have 
been ‘‘saved’’ by that belief. ... 


5 


BUT though many Hindus may have found comfort 
in Yoga and the other philosophical systems, the vast 
majority of the people have always taken refuge in less 
abstruse beliefs. “To this day the religion of the Hindu 
serfs and peasants, especially in the south, is still almost 
the primitive animism of the aboriginal blacks. It is 
said that four-fifths of the people of India still worship 
local spirits, usually female demons, with the most re- 
volting of animal sacrifices. “The orthodox Hinduism 
of the brahmins is opposed to animal slaughter, and es- 
pecially reveres the cow. But the naked masses out in 
the jungles pay little heed to that taboo, and on occa- 
sion they even manage to engage fallen brahmins to 
officiate at their animal sacrifices. “Those wretched half- 
starved peasants worship godlings, demons, and ghosts, 
and carry on in the jungles much as did their black an- 
cestors thousands of years ago. For they are still afraid. 
They are not tired of life, as are so many of the higher- 
caste Hindus. Actually those serfs have never really 
lived enough even to know life, let alone be tired of 
it. They've merely existed; they've been growing, 
spawning, and dying, generation after generation, like 
so many jungle rodents. And therefore they’ve never 
been able to understand the philosopher’s world-weary 
appetite for annihilation. Those masses still hunger 


164 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


for life—but life enriched and made brahminically 
luxuriant. 

‘That is why ake peasants flock to the temples with 
offerings of meat or flowers, and pray fearfully to the 
idols of wood and stone. “They imagine that thus they 
can win for themselves an easier life in a higher caste 
when they are born again. Or if they dream at all of 
escape from the cycle of reincarnating life, it is never 
of escape into passivity and nothingness. Nirvana to 
them is not a mental state of utter imperturbability in 
this world, but a physical riot of joy in some other 
world. And the attainment of that lusty Nirvana is 
of course their highest hope. ‘To win it they will go 

3 wen ae ces «6tQ 6hCalmost incredible ex- 
cesses of piety. Millions 
of them when old and 
decrepit will crawl on 
their bellies to the River 
Ganges simply because the 
belief prevails that for 
drawing the last breath by 
the side of the Ganges, a 
dying man’s soul receives 
certain and immediate 
transportation to Shiva’s 
heaven. Benares, on the 
banks of the Ganges, con- 
IDOLS GROTESQUE BEYOND tains over two thousand 

WORDS 
temples and uncounted 
lesser shrines, all of them supported by such credulous 
Hindu pilgrims. 
Benares, however, is not the only holy city in the 





WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA 165 





land, nor the Ganges the only holy river. Every corner 
of India has its own temples and shrines. Idols gro- 
tesque beyond description are to be found everywhere: 
elephant-headed bodies, three-eyed gargoyles, monsters 
with many heads, and all manner of other such fear- 
inspiring creations. And to these idols, which increase 
yearly in number and monstrosity, the millions of India 
give adoration. ‘The priests, who are supposed to wake 
and wash and feed the idols, are still the aristocrats. 
Many a serf in India today refuses to break his fast in 
the morning save with water in which the toe of a brah- 
min has been dipped. Caste still has hold of the 
people with an iron grip. Its original four divisions 
have multiplied many fold, and the population is now 
broken up into hundreds of little sub-castes. And there 
are said to be fifty million men and women in the land 
who are considered too low to belong even to the lowest 
sub-caste. “hey are the outcasts, the ‘“Untouchables,”’ 
whose very crossing of the shadow of a brahmin is sup- 
posed to render him ritually unclean! 

One wonders what will come of it all. Fear, organized 
and intensified by. priestcraft, has led poor India into a 
quicksand whence there seems no escape. Century after 
century brave attempts have been made to reform the 
religion; but invariably they have met with failure. 
No matter how many prophets come to the masses to 
tell them to destroy their idols and cast out their priests, 
those masses will not obey. “They simply must have 
their reeds to cling to, their spirits to believe in. For 
Ebevrare still afraid... . afraid..°.) .. 


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BOOK FOUR 
WHA HAPPENED IN CHINA 


I. CONFUCIANISM 


1: The primitive religion of \China—ancestor-worship—the 
state cult—the popular religion—burial customs—family 
festivalk—why did China advance so early? 2: The story of 
Confucius. 3: The work of Confucius—his gospel—his place 
in history. 4: The deification of Confucius. 


II. TAOISM 
1: The life of Lao-Tze—the Tao-Teh-king—the gospel—was 


Lao-Tze a religious teacher? 2: The degeneration of Taoism 
—alchemy—-gods and priests—the deification of Lao-Tze. 


III. BUDDHISM 


1: How it entered China—why it succeeded there—its rise and 
fall. 2: The Land of the ‘“Three Truths’’—popular worship. 


a 


BOOK FOUR 
“WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 


I, CONFUCIANISM 


religion of China, no one seems 
to know for certain. Some 
scholars maintain it was al- 
most or quite a monotheism, 
for from earliest times the 
Chinese seem to have wor- 
shipped a Supreme Ruler usu- 
ally identified with MHeaven. 
3 me [his theory of an early mon- 

ern “a otheism can hardly be accepted, 
however, for side by side with the worship of the 
Supreme Ruler, the Spirit of Heaven, there went on also 
the worship of numerous spirits of the earth. As far 
back as we can go, the Chinese seem to have reached out 
for help to the spirits which they supposed animated 
all natural phenomena, and especially to the ghosts of 
the dead. It is therefore safer to describe the earliest 
religion of China as an advanced animism rather than a 
monotheism—a peculiar animism rooted in the wor- 
ship of the spirits of nature and the worship of the spirits 
of the dead. Perhaps originally those two elements, 
nature- and ancestor-worship were rivals for the allegi- 
169 


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1700) THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


ance of the people; but later they were fused together by 
the belief that Heaven, the chief of the nature spirits, was 
the first forefather of the emperor, and therefore the chief 
also of the ancestor spirits. 

Devotion to the dead was the outstanding charac- 
teristic of the Chinese religion from the very beginning. 
It was incumbent upon all men, high as well as low, to 
worship the spirits of their individual forefathers. The 
emperor worshipped the spirit of Heaven as his ancestor, 
and the regular sacrifices which he offered to it were the 
occasion of tremendous ritual display. In a wide deserted ~ 
reach of sand just south of Peking there still stands the 
magnificent altar of pure white marble upon which the 
emperor, clad in robes as azure as the sky, kow- 
towed and made offerings once each year. It was 
believed that if the emperor should make the slightest 
error in those annual rites, lo, the whole world would 
straightway go to chaos! And for any other man in 
the land to presume to sacrifice to the spirit associated 
with Heaven was tantamount to a declaration of rebel- 
lion. The emperor was the religious head of the nation, 
and because the greater spirits were supposed to be his 
exclusive ancestors, their worship was deemed his exclu- 
sive privilege. Annually he made offerings to the spirit 
of the Earth, from which he also claimed descent. He 
made them in a:second sandy, pine-dotted plain outside 
Peking, and with much the same pomp as was employed 
by him in worshipping Heaven. He also worshipped 
the spirits of the soil and the crops and the rivers, and 
if they did not respond properly, he deposed them much 
as he might depose a disobedient prince. Being ‘‘Son of 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 171 


Heaven and Earth,”’ he had the right to reduce or in- 
crease the number of spirits at will! 

All this, however, was only the state religion. The 
ordinary people could no more approach the god called 
Heaven than they could approach the emperor, and they 
could no more share in the worship of Heaven than they 
could have a hand in the government. Necessarily, 
therefore, they cherished a separate religion of their own. 
Harried by the dangers and frustrations of life, they 


turned for help to the spirits of their own forefathers. “ 


Funerals were the occasion of the most elaborate rites 
and offerings. Clothes and food were put into the 
graves. Even retainers and relatives were sometimes 
slaughtered and buried with the corpse of a man of 
rank. ‘The same thing, of course, was done in Egypt 
when a king died. “The pyramids are stocked full with 
sumptuous furniture and other possessions. In early 
Greece, too, that practice was once observed, and there 
it was carried to such excess that the statesman, Solon, 
felt compelled to legislate against it. But in China, 
where the custom must also have threatened to become a 
serious menace to economic stability, it was curbed 
in another way. It was not suppressed there but alleg- 
orized. What was called the ‘“‘make-see’’ device was in- 
troduced, and thenceforth the slaves buried with the 
corpse were merely wooden dolls, and the clothes were 
of paper! Mere pictures of food and furniture were 
considered real enough to be sacrificed and buried with 
the dead! 

Perhaps that subterfuge was possible in China and not 
in other lands because the Chinese took a peculiar atti- 


172 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


tude toward those who had departed this life. In Egypt, 
Greece, and wherever else possessions were buried with 
the dead, it was frankly conceded that the practice was 
observed in order that the departed souls might be well 
taken care of in the next world. “The Chinese, however, 
refused to make that admission. “They knew nothing 
about any other world than this, and seemed not to have 
been interested enough even to speculate about it. There 
was a distinct belief in China that the dead did survive 
somewhere—but just where, no one troubled to ask. 
All that the Chinese were concerned about was that the 
ghosts of the dead should come back and help the living. 
To that end they offered regular sacrifices to the ghosts, 
worshipping them through the medium of living “‘per- 
sonators’’ who sat stock-still throughout the ceremony, 
and then ate a share of the offerings. In later days simple 
memorial tablets of stone were made to serve as substi- 
tutes for these “‘personators.’’ ‘The higher classes built 
temples in which to keep their ancestral tablets; the 
lower kept them in the main (usually the only) room in 
their huts. 

The sacrifices to the spirits of the dead were really 
family feasts. All the art and mystery of Chinese cook- 
ing went into the preparation of the sauces, relishes, 
little cakes, and condiments that were used. Divers 
drinks made from millet were set out with those dishes of 
food; and then the ceremony began. With the most 
scrupulous care each minute detail of the ritual was en- 
acted, while drums boomed, flutes screeched, and huge 
stringed instruments let out their persistent ping-ping. 
Both men and women sang songs and danced panto- 
mimic dances that were imagined to be entertaining to 


WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 173 


the ghosts in the room. For hours the ceremony went 
on, sometimes outlasting the day. And then finally the 
““prayer officer’’ would declare that the ghosts were satis- 
fied. Gravely he would bless the celebrant, saying: 
“Fragrant hath been thy filial sacrifice, and the spirits 
have delighted in the liquors and viands. “They shower 
on thee a hundred blessings, each as it is desired and as 
certain as law. [hou hast been exact and earnest, and 
thou wilt surely be blessed with favors in the myriads 
and tens of myriads.’”’ Whereupon bells and drums 
would raise a mighty din, and the spirits of the dead 
would politely leave. Having sat in ghostly invisibil- 
ity throughout the ceremony, having hearkened to the 
noise, smelled the punk, eaten of the food, and drunk 
till they were presumed to be full, the spirits would 
“tranquilly withdraw” to that unknown bourne where | 
they had their permanent residence. And the celebrants, 
exhausted but happy, would then arise and wearily set 
to clearing away the dishes... . 

In no other part of the world did a religion of so 
bland a character develop. “The element of fear was 
either nonexistent in it, or kept effectively buried beneath 
a thick skin of courage and confidence. There was no 
such thing as prayer for the benefit of the dead, for no 
Chinese dared to insult his ancestors by imagining them 
to be in any need of help. Prayers were offered to the 
dead, and only in order to bring them near and secure 
their aid. Of course, it must not be imagined that the 
Chinese peasants three thousand years ago knew no 
demons to fear or taboos to dread. But it is safe to say 
that, of all ancient peoples, the Chinese were the least 
intimidated by such things. Perhaps that is why of all 


174 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





ancient peoples the Chinese were the first to dare push 
forward along that adventurous path which we cal! 
civilization. Perhaps it was because the Chinese lived - 
largely without terror and altogether without priests, 
and that in an age when Athens was still a village and 
Rome was not yet built, when Britain was still outside 
the world and Gaul was but a wilderness roamed by © 
savages, China was already a civilized land where people 
rode around in carriages, lived in well-built houses, 
dressed in silk, wore leather shoes, sat on chairs, used 
tables, ate food from plates, measured time by a sundial, 
and carried umbrellas! .. . 


u 


BUT if one dares to claim that the fearless, priestless 
religion of China was responsible for her early advance 
in civilization, one must admit it was responsible also 
for her early arrest. “Today China is one of the most 
backward lands on earth, and it seems evident that her 
backward-looking ancestor-worship is in large part to: 
blame for that condition. For ancestor-worship has 
remained the orthodox religion of China. Until the 
revolution occurred in 1912, it was still possible to see 
the emperor with his vast retinue go out to the great 
aitars south and north of Peking, and sacrifice there to 
Heaven and Earth almost exactly as did his predecessors 
three thousand years earlier. And although the coming 
of a republic to China has brought an end to that 
imperial worship of Heaven, the old family worship of 
the ghosts of the ancestors still persists. It may be far 
less naive and crude today than it was when the night of 
barbarism had barely lifted in China; but of all the 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 175 


religions in the world it has suffered least alteration at 
the hands of time. 

It is customary in the West to speak of the orthodox 
ancestor-worship of China as Confucianism. It must 
not be imagined, however, that the figure of Confucius 
is related to this religion as, for instance, Buddha is re- 
lated to Buddhism, or Mohammed is related to Moham- 
medanism. Confucius was not at all the founder of the: 
religion, or even its reformer. Rather he was its con- 
server, taking hold of it twenty-five hundred years ago, 
when it was just beginning to decay, and revivifying it 
so that it could remain the dominant force in the life of 
the Chinese from then on. He said of himself that he 
was ‘“‘not a maker but a transmitter, believing in and 
loving the ancients’’—and in hardly a word or act did 
he belie that description. 

Confucius, whose Chinese name was Kung-fu-tze, 
lived in that amazing century, the sixth B. C., which pro- 
duced Mahavira and Buddha in India, Zoroaster (per- 
haps) in Persia, and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Second 
[saiah in Israel. He was born in 551 B.C., and of his 
early life we know practically nothing. All we are told 
with any credibility is that at twenty-two he was already 
a teacher, and an extraordinarily popular one. But his 
following seems to have been quite unlike the following 
of most other young teachers who have left their mark 
on civilization. [hose who sat at the feet of Confucius 
were not zealous rebels but pious students. For Con- 
fucius himself was in no sense a rebel. He was an anti- 
quarian, a man who loved the ancients and devoted 
himself whole-souled to the study of their wisdom and 
their ways. Very early he acauired the standing of an 





176 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


expert in the ancient ritual customs, and he counted as 
one of the great experiences of his life the opportunity 
which once came to him to visit Peking and inspect the 
places where the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth 
were offered. 

For many years Confucius spent all his time collect- 
ing and editing the old writings of his people, and he 
was not called upon to apply himself to practical affairs | 
until he was fifty years of age. In 501 he received the 
appointment of chief magistrate to a city named Chung- 
tu: and tradition declares that within a twelvemonth he 
had rid that city of every vestige of crime. He accom- 
plished this miracle by subjecting all life to an elaborate 
etiquette. Even the food which different classes might 
eat was regulated. All living beings were regimented, 
and even the corpses were laid away in coffins of a pre- 
scribed thickness and buried in graves of a prescribed 
shape! | 

Whereupon, so goes the story, the duke of the prov- 
ince elevated Confucius to ever higher offices, finally 
making him the Minister of Justice. And as Minister of 
Justice, Confucius haltered the population so effectively 
with rules and regulations, that in a very little while 
the whole province became a model state, and all the 
laws against crime fell into disuse. ‘‘Dishonesty and 
dissoluteness were ashamed. Loyalty and good faith 
marked every man, and chastity and submissiveness 
graced every woman. Strangers in vast multitudes 
came flocking from other cities, and the fame of Kung- 
fu-tze, the idol of the people, flew in song from every 
mouth’’—at least, so declare the not altogether unpreju- 
diced biographers of the sage... . 


WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 177 


But matters went too well to last for long. Neigh- 
boring princes, jealous of the prosperity and peace in the 
reformed province, seduced the mind of the duke with 
presents of fast horses and faster dancing girls. The 
wonder-working minister, suddenly finding himself out 
of favor, sadly—and very slowly, for to the last he 
hoped the duke might repent—shook the dust of the 
ungrateful prOViNCC papper 
from his feet. He began 
to make the rounds of 
China, going from one 
court to another and 
freely offering his serv- 
ices to every prince and 
minister he met. With 
naive assurance he told 
them, “In a twelve- 
month I could effect 
great changes, and in 
three years I could per- 
fect everything!’’ But 
there was none in the 
land to take advantage 
of his offer. He wan- 
dered about for thirteen ETE 
long years without find- KING-FU-TZE 
ing a single ruler willing to give him employment. 
Evidently he was looked on with suspicion by princes 
and people, and at least once he was attacked by a mob 
and almost assassinated. Many a day he was forced to 
go without food, and many a night he was left without 
shelter. Yet during all those years his heart did not fail 


i 









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il 


HEAT ILHTTE 








178 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


him. Stubbornly he remained confident that Heaven 
would protect him in his mission of truth, and despite 
every discouragement he continued to hope for a chance 
to save the world. 

But at last there came the day when he could wan- 
der no longer. Life began to ebb from his old bones, 
and in sorrow he returned to his native province to spend 
his last days in the study of his beloved ancient scrolls. 
His body shrivelled into a dry yellow sack, and his 
courage withered and faded quite away. Perhaps he 
grew querulous toward the end; certainly he became 
plaintive and helplessly resentful. ‘The great mountain 
totters,’’ he mumbled to himself as death came over him: 
“aye, the stout beam breaks, and the wise man wilteth 
like a plant! ‘There is not one in the empire that will 
make me his teacher! Verily, my time has come to die!”’ 
. . . And thus ended the life of Kung-fu-tze. . , 


3 


NOW it is obvious that this man, one of the greatest 
in all history, hardly deserves to be described as a re- 
ligious prophet. Prophets almost invariably are rebels, 
holy heretics forever breaking with the past. But this 
man, Confucius, sought not to break with the past, but 
rather to heal the breach that had already been made. 
And he did heal it. By his diligent labor in editing the 
old sacred writings of China and establishing their 
paramount authority, he laid a yoke on his people that 
to this day they have been unable to throw off... . 
This is not the place to go into a discussion of the books, 
the five king, and the four shu, which he or his imme- 
diate disciples under him are supposed to have written. 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA Lig 





For the most part they are made up of collections of 
ancient ritual hymns, ceremonial laws, magic “‘permuta- 
tions,’ historical chronicles, and proverbs. “Their im- 
portance to us rests not upon their own merit, but solely 
upon the very real though nigh incredible fact that 
almost to this day they have dominated the life and 
thought of all learned China. Upon that fact, too, rests 
the importance of Confucius. He was in no sense an in- 
novator. He did not contribute a single new idea or 
practice or experience to the inherited religion of his 
country. But he was most effectively a conserver. He 
took hold of an already ancient and decadent religion, 
and by dint of organizing its scattered traditions, man- 
aged to infuse imperishable life into it. It is question- 
able whether any other man in all history has had 
more lasting influence on a people than that old sage 
of Shantung who in his life could not even get a 
HOD Elon as « 

But though Confucius organized and virtually es- 
tablished a great religion, he himself in the narrower 
sense was not a religious man. He knew very little about 
the gods, and seems to have cared less. When a disciple 
asked about the service of the spirits, he is reported 
to have answered: ‘‘So long as thou art not able to 
serve men, how canst thou serve the spirits?’’ Nor 
had he a word to say about the next world. ‘So long 
as thou dost not know life,’’ he declared, ““‘how canst 
thou know death?’’ He saw no reason for prayer, and - 
scorned all interest in the supernatural. ‘To give one- 
self earnestly to the service of men, and while respecting 
the spirits, to make no great to-do about them—that 
is wisdom,”’ he said. . . . Quite clearly, therefore, Con- 


180 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


fucius had little of that fear and none of that humility 
which drive men to implore the help of gods. He saw 
little need for gods, for he believed in himself, in his 
own might as a righteous man. ‘“‘What a superior man 
seeks,’ he declared, “‘is in himself!” . .. It seemed 
to Confucius that if only a man conducted himself with 
propriety, then frustration and despair were impossible. 
He believed in the moral power of deeds quite as much 
as his savage ancestor might have believed in the efficacy 
of magic spells. Indeed, it is reported that once he 
declared the very stars were held in their courses solely 
by the moral propriety of man. Not unjustly, there- 
fore, Confucius may be described as a shaman who 
relied on moral prescriptions rather than magic rites 
as the means wherewith to control the universe. His 
highest contribution was in the field of ethics, and his > 
proverbs are quoted—-and in the breach, at least, ob- 
served—still today. There is no extravagant idealism 
to be found in them, no exaggerated turn-the-other- 
cheekiness. “There are proverbs for the guidance of all- 
too-human humanity, and other-worldiness has no place 
in them. “It is folly to withdraw from the world,”’ 
Confucius declared, ‘‘and make fellowship with birds 
and beasts that are not our fellows. With whom should 
I make fellowship save with suffering mankind? .. .” 

But it is important that we resist the temptation to 
exaggerate the majesty of Confucius even as an ethical 
teacher. “Ihe common tendency to class him with the 
great sages who came markedly to the front in Greece 
a century or two later is hardly warranted. It is true 
that they also were quite willing to bend the knee to 
any and every god so long as they were left to bend 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 181 


their thoughts as they alone willed. But they differed 
from Confucius in that they bent their thoughts to the 
new, not the old. “They dared to venture out into 
virgin lands of the spirit, blazing trails through wilder- 
nesses no human minds had yet traversed. But Confu- 
cius? He deployed the forces of his reason only into 
the decayed and rutted moors of the past. He may 
have doubted the existence of the ancient gods, but 
never did he doubt the validity of the ancient rites paid 
to them. He held it incumbent upon all men to wor- 
ship with the most scrupulous care, not so much for 
the gracious benefit of the spirits who were worshipped 
as for disciplinary benefit to the men who did the wor- 
shipping. Propriety, regularity, exact and punctilious 
observance of the “‘three hundred points of ceremony 
and three thousand points of behavior’’—these were the 
ultimate ends and aims of life. Confucius himself, we 
are told, carried this ritual of regularity in his life to 
quite fantastic extremes. Even his posture while asleep 
in bed was in accordance with a fixed ruling! ... 
Everything had to be ordered, for ‘Order is Heaven’s 
only law.’’ All change was injurious, and salvation 
could be obtained only if none tried to disturb the re- 
ligious, social, and political order that already was estab- 
lished. Of course, one had to go for the ultimate au- 
thority for the details of that order to the golden past. 
Whatever was of the fathers seemed to Confucius to be 
for the sons. Filial piety, respect for the ancestors, was 
in his eyes the highest of all virtues. 
And exalting that virtue, he died. 





182 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


4 


BUT then Confucius began to live anew. Devoted 
disciples set down his words in huge collections which 
are called the ‘“‘Analects."’ “The memory of the great 
sage began to grow in might, especially in the following 
century, when a new disciple, Mencius, arose to spread - 
his doctrines. In the third century a successful usurper 
of the throne tried his best 
to uproot the whole 
growth, for its uncom- 
promising condemnation 
of all nonconformity and 
change made his rebellious 
life indescribably hard. 
This emperor put forth 
systematic effort to de- 
stroy all the Confucian 
books, and to slay all 
those who knew them by 
-¥ heart. But he failed, and 
oie when a member of an old- 
#1 time dynasty regained the 
imperial throne, Con- 
fucianism began _ to 

A CONFUCIAN TEMPLE flourish as never before. 
Confucius himself was ex- 

alted until he became a veritable god. In the year 1 A. D., * 
the old antiquarian was canonized. ‘“‘Duke Ni, the All- 
Complete and All-Illustrious,’’ he was officially named. 
... In 57 A.D., it was ordered that sacrifices be offered 
to him at all the colleges. . . . In the year 89 he was 


7 Ea en e 
GE 
a 


Eds 


| 
‘ 


( 











WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 1383 


raised to the higher imperial rank of ‘‘Earl,’”’ and in 267 
it was decreed that more elaborate animal sacrifices be 
offered to him four times a year. . . . In 492 even more 
honor was done him, and he was officially canonized 
“the Venerable Ni, the Accomplished Sage.” ... In 
555 separate temples for the worship of Confucius were 
ordered at the capitals of all prefectures in China, and in 
740 his image was moved from the side to the center of 
the Imperial College, to stand with the historic Kings of 
China. . . . In 1068 he was raised to the full rank of 
Emperor. ... And finally in 1907 the Empress 
Dowager raised him to the first grade of worship, rank- 
ing him with the deities Heaven and Earth! 

And thus it has come about that he who in life was 
beaten and hounded is now a god for all China. He 
who had no sheltering place now has over fifteen hun- 
dred temples to house his tablets; he who was starved 
now has over sixty-two thousand animals offered to his 
ghost every year. Worse still, he who saw no untoward 
need for prayer has himself been made the object of 
prayer, and he who had little use for gods has himself 
been made co-equal with Heaven. . . . Irony! 


II. TAOISM 


CONFUCIUS, the practical man, the organizer, the 
high-priest of the meticulous, is frequently pointed to 
as the personification of the entire Chinese character. 
But that is not just. In the maze which is the Chinese 
mind—as in the maze which is every other mind— 
there are many paths shadowed by wild hedges of 
mysticism. If China has made a god of the practical 


184 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Confucius, she has done no less by the mystical Lao- 
WUZeS eae 

Unhappily we have almost no reliable data concern- 
ing the life of Lao-Tze. His case is not like that of 
most of the other great men of the past—like the case, 
for instance, of Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, or 
Mohammed. Concerning each of these men we have 
legends and traditions that offer at least a few nails not 
too loose to sustain the threadbare tapestries of 
““critical’’ biography. But concerning Lao-Tze we have 
not even a half-dependable fact. Our main source of 
information is a short sketch of two hundred and forty- 
eight Chinese words which were set down at least five 
centuries after the philosopher’s death. 

Lao-Tze, whose name may be translated the “Old 
Scholar,’’ or perhaps the “‘Old Boy,”’ is said to have been 
born in the year 604 B. C., and is supposed to have been 
the librarian at the court of the province of Chou. There 
is an anecdote told of how Confucius, while staying once 
at this court, tried to learn from the then very aged 
librarian some obscure details concerning the outworn 
customs of the province. But all he got for his pains 
was a severe drubbing, and he left the court saying Lao- 
‘Tze was as inexplicable and terrible as a dragon. Con- 
fucius was completely bewildered by the old man, for 
in him he was confronted with a mind more unlike his 
own than seemed possible. Lao-Tze was possessed of 
one of those tremendously inquisitive, speculative, 
adventurous intellects. He was forever asking why? 
Unlike Confucius, Lao-Tze could not blandly take the 
world for granted, but had to know first who was 
granting it, and how, and why. And he was old, and 


WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 185 


very tired, and very wise. ‘The lust after earthly con- 
quest had long seeped out of his brittle bones, and only 
the vanity of all life and striving filled his bleared little 
almond eyes. No wonder, then, if he had slight patience 
with the eager, hopeful, bustling young world-saver 
who came to consult him on the forgotten ways of the 
past. 

The story is told of how in his very last days, Lao- 
Tze tried to flee from the province of Chou because of 
the anarchy into which the state had fallen. Like Con- 
fucius, the older man sorely lamented the “‘poverty of 
the people’ and the “‘great disorder’ and chicanery in 
the land; but, unlike Confucius, he did not feel himself 
called upon to try to remedy these evils. He told him- 
self that “‘to withdraw into obscurity is the way of 
Heaven,” and forthwith tried to clear out. But at the 
frontier the captain of the garrison halted the old man, 
and asked him to write out his philosophy of life be- 
fore going into exile. And so there, in a little frontier 
garrison in ancient China, Lao-Tze wrote the book 
which is the Bible of the whole Taoist religion. The 
‘““Tao- Teh-king’’ the book is called, and although many 
scholars claim it was never written by Lao-Tze him- 
self, it is reasonably certain that it contains many of 
the ideas which the old sage himself thought out. It is 
a very brief book, barely five thousand words in length, 
and could be set down here verbatim in less than 
twenty pages. No doubt its very conciseness, its 
severely ungenerous brevity, was responsible for the 
little understanding it received in later generations. 

The book consists of two sections: the first, the Tao, 
sets out to tell the why of the universe, and the second, 


186 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


the Teh, endeavors to tell the how of life. The word 
Tao is almost untranslatable. A remote approximation 
to it is the word ‘Nature’ or perhaps ““Way.” ‘Tao 
is that which is behind all other things, the fundamental 
reality, the “Way of the Universe.’’ As Lao-Tze him- 
self said: ‘““There is a Something undifferentiated and 
yet perfect, which existed before heaven and earth ever 
came into being. I know not its name, and if I must 
designate it, I can call it only Tao.”’ The outstanding 
characteristic of this Tao is that it does everything 
without giving any sign of doing anything. It is a~ 
great, inchoate, incorporeal, intangible Something that 
never exerts itself, and never gets excited. It simply 
Ret reli 
And in that very passivity, said Lao-Tze, the Tao’ 
sets the standard for the proper life of man. ‘There is 
but one Teh, one ‘“‘Virtue,’’ for man, and that is to 
emulate the poise and inaction of Tao. It is vain beyond 
words for any individual to try to accomplish anything 
in a fever. Fussy meddling with the world, breathless 
striving to reform or debauch it, are so much sheer folly. 
‘There are but ‘““Three Jewels’’ of character, and choicest 
of them is wu wet, “inactivity.” The true disciple is 
everlastingly silent, even about Tao. He rejects all 
learning and scoffs at all hunger for learning. He is a 
thoroughgoing nihilist, refusing to trouble himself 
sufficiently to believe anything or do anything. Even 
to defend himself from injury is too much of a bother. 
Confucius taught that reciprocity is one of the main 
laws of ethics. “The good should be requited with good 
and the evil with evil. But Lao-Tze taught far dif- 
ferently. He declared: ‘To them that are good I am ~ 





RS — 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 187 


good, and to them that are not good J am also good; 
thus all get to be good. ‘Yo them that are sincere J am 
sincere, and to them that are not sincere I am also 
sincere; thus all get to be sincere.” . .. Weakness 
seemed to him the greatest strength. ‘There is nothing 
in the world more soft and weak than water,’’ he said; 
“yet for attacking things that are firm and strong 
nothing surpasses it.’’ An extraordinary spectacle, this: 
a decrepit old yellow-skinned sage sitting there in a wild 
frontier camp in China five hundred years before Jesus 
ever walked on earth, and calmly telling the world to 
return good for evil! ... 

Next to inactivity, the most precious “Jewel” of 
character is humility. ‘“When merit hath been achieved, 
take it not unto thyself,” said Lao-Tze. ‘“‘If thou dost 
not take it unto thyself, behold, it can never be taken 
from thee!’’ Or again: ‘‘Keep behind, and thou shalt 
inevitably be kept in front.’”’ ‘““The wise man is he 
alone who rests satisfied with what he has.’’ ‘There is 
no greater guilt than to sanction ambition; neither is 
there any greater calamity than to be discontented with 
Goeemotwe., . And next to humility . the most 
- precious “‘jewel’’ is frugality. Just as out of weakness 
comes strength and out of humility comes prominence, 
so out of frugality comes liberality. As Lao-Tze put 
it; ““Ihe wise man doth not accumulate. The more 
he expends for others, the more doth he possess of his 
own; the more he giveth to others, the more hath he 
for himself.’’ 

Of religion in the narrow sense of the word, Lao- 
Tze said nothing. He did not believe in the gods, and 
he was unalterably opposed to all forms of worship. 


188 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


He thought sacrifice and prayer both vain and imperti- 
nent, for they endeavored to bring nature into harmony 
with man, when properly it was man’s duty to let him- 
self passively sink into harmony with nature. Only 
once in the ‘“Tao-Teh-king’’ is the Supreme god, 
Shang-ti, mentioned, and then only to make known 
that he is inferior to the ineffable Tao. In the narrower 
sense of the word, therefore, Lao-Tze was distinctly 
not a religious man. 

But in the broader sense of the word, Lao-Tze was 
superlatively a man of faith. For all the eerie mor- 
bidness of his nihilistic doctrine, Lao-T’ze was pro- 
foundly a spiritual being. He saw with blinding clarity 
what Confucius never even remotely suspected—that 
all life is but an ark of bulrushes drowning in a swamp 
of vanity. Desperately was he conscious of the need for 
security, of the need for something infinite in time and 
space to which finite little man might cling. And that 
was why he was so attached to the idea of Tao, and 
taught that the one road to salvation for every man was 
utter union with that Tao. In all the mystic literature 
of the world, it would be hard to find a warmer or 
richer glow than that in the ‘““T’ao-Teh-king.”’ 


2 


OF course a teaching so aloof and unpractical could 
not remain undefiled and stand any chance of entering 
the hearts of ordinary men. Tradition declares that 
when Lao-Tze had made an end to his writing, and 
was free to take up his journey once more, he went off 
into the world beyond, and was never again seen by 
man. He died, and perhaps he was buried—though 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 189 


no man knows how or where. But his book lived, and 
soon many philosophers were to be found in the hills 
or far in the forests of China, striving there to live 
according to the teachings of that book. In caves and 
the hollowed trunks of trees they sat and labored to 
practice kenosis—the seeing, doing, and thinking of 
nothing. 

And the plain people were, of course, tremendously 
impressed when rumors of the strange doctrines of the 
*“Tao-Teh-king’’ reached them. And they were even 
more impressed by the extraordinary men who actually 
tried to live up to those doctrines. “They imagined 
such men must be not merely saints, but also magicians. 
Whereupon not a few of those men, either out of 
knavery or self-delusion, did set up as magicians. “The 
“’Tao-Teh-king’’ degenerated in their hands from a 
source of spiritual wisdom into a textbook of magic 
formulae. ‘They harried and fretted it to shreds in a 
mad hunt for the secrets it might contain. Emperors 
were fooled into spending fortunes on the hare-brained 
researches of so-called ‘‘professors of Taoism.’ In the 
third century A. D. one emperor actually sent out two 
huge expeditions to discover certain magic islands 
wherein, according to the “‘professors,’’ the elixir of 
life might be found that would make all men immortal, 
and the philosopher’s stone that could turn all metals 
to gold. In the middle ages another emperor actually 
died of drinking too much of an elixir of life! .. 
Men of all classes spent their substance in a frantic hunt 
for those vain things, life and wealth, which the little 
old mystic, Lao-Tze, had scorned most bitterly. 

A whole religion of Taoism arose. Under the in- 


190 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





A “PROFESSOR OF TAOISM” 


fluence of Buddhism, the Taoist hermits began: to 
organize themselves into orders. All their lives they 
did everything imaginable just to acquire great 
monasteries in which to do nothing! . .. Temples 
arose, and in them priests—Wu they were called— 
offered sacrifices to idols! Even a high-priesthood 
arose, and to this day there lives on top of a mountain 
in the province of Kiang-si a pope of the Taoist Church 
who calls himself T’ien-shi, the “‘Heaven Master!’’ 

And thus has time played scurvily with the work 
of Lao-Tze. He who declared that the wise man never 
accumulates has been made the prophet of a cult that 
seeks naught save accumulation. He who declared that 
life is the sorriest of vanities has been hailed the dis- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 191 


coverer of magic potions to make life everlasting. Above 
all, he who laughed at the gods and scoffed at their 
worship has himself been made a god. ... What 
irony! For two thousand and eighty-one years now, 
ever since 156 B.C., that little old nihilist, Lao-Tze, 
has been worshipped with sacrifices throughout the land 
of China! ... | 


II. BUDDHISM 


BUT the religion of China today is neither Confu- 
cianism alone, nor Taoism—nor even a combination of 
the two. A third element long ago entered into the 
amalgam: Buddhism. Sometime in the second century 
B. C., after having made its way through Afghanistan 
and Turkestan, Buddhism finally entered China. It 
did not spread at once, however. Buddhism then was 
not yet sufficiently bedizened with easy doctrines and 
lovable idols for it to have any great proselyting power. 
But. by the second century A.D. it had become an 
entirely new religion, very generously salvationistic and 
frankly compromising; and then it spread with great 
rapidity. 

The new Buddhism seems to have had an irresistible 
lure for the people of China. It had comforts to offer 
that their own old religions knew nothing about. For 
one thing, it offered them a very personal and personable 
god, an idolized Buddha whose serenely placid face and 
gracefully rotund body could be seen and kissed and 
kow-towed to in every temple. Confucianism allowed 
neither idols nor temples. Sacrifices were offered only 
to tablets, and on altars under the open sky. But this 
new religion from India brought with it a whole galaxy 





A CHINESE BUDDHA 


192 


WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 193 


of attractive idols, and a whole art of temple architecture. 

Then, too, Buddhism had a great deal of information 

to impart concerning life after death. Confucianism, 
for all its eagerness to obtain aid from the dead, had 
nothing at all to say concerning their abode. But Budd- 
hism had a very wonderful heaven and a very terrible 
hell of which to tell, and made prayer for the dead a 
desperately important 
matter. After the com- 
ing of Buddhism the 
Chinese in their worship 
of the ancestors began to 
pray for the souls of the 
dead, as well as to them. wt. 
At present, even in Chi- tarens borg 
nese homes where Budd- 
hism is not accepted, it 
is usual for masses to be 
recited for the peace of 
the dead. 

But the new Budd- 
hism’s greatest attraction 
lay in the fact that it 
was so thoroughly a reli- 
gion of salvation. To 
poor blind people grop- 
ing about in the darkness of life, it offered light. It told 
them that they had merely to believe in the Buddha, in 
him who was called the “Enlightened One,’’ and 
straightway all would become as day for them. Neither 
Confucianism nor Taoism had a tithe as much to offer. 
Confucianism, indeed, had nothing to say concerning 





A CHINESE ALTAR 





Meds THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


salvation. It was so busy telling men how to live that 
it forgot even to ask—let alone to answer—the question 
why they should live. And ‘Taoism, fallen till it was a 
mere slut in the laboratories of alchemists, was no better. 
Even though it did ask why men should live, it offered 
an answer thit the masses could not possibly fathom. It 
assured the coolie in the rice-swamp that he lived to 
make it possitle for the emperor and his magicians to 
go hunting thi elixir of life—and that was far from 
an adequate explanation for him. 

So Buddhism-—or more exactly, the religion that was 
called Buddhism seven hundred years after Buddha died 
—had no very great difficulty in winning adherents in 
China. From the third century on it flourished openly. 
Temples and monasteries sprang up throughout the 
land, and Chinese by the myriad were converted. The 
governing class, it is true, did not always favor the 
new faith. It was something new, and from their 
Confucian point of view it was therefore bad... . In 
the fifth century dreadful persecutions of the Buddhists 
took place. Monasteries and pagodas were pillaged and 
burnt, and unnumbered monks and nuns were deported 
or put to death. But in a little while came a reaction, 
and at the beginning of the sixth century the very em- 
peror himself abdicated his throne in order to become 
a Buddhist monk! In the following centuries the faith 
continued to fluctuate in public favor. Again and again 
the mandarins protested against it, claiming it was 
altogether incompatible with the authentic old Chinese 
spirit. They accused it also of fostering lewdness, 
especially in its nunneries. In 884 A. D. violent persecu- 
tions broke out again, and Buddhism then suffered a 





WHAT HAPPENED IN CHINA 195 


blow from which it never fully recovered. All the 
forty thousand Buddhist monasteries, temples, and 
pagodas in the land were ordered to be razed to the 
ground. Their bronze images, bells, and metal plates 
were melted down and coined into money, and their iron 
statues were recast into ploughshares and shovels. As 
for the monks and nuns—who numbered well over a 
quarter of a million—they were all summarily com- 
manded to return to secular life or leave the country. 
And though in later years Buddhism managed to rebuild 
some of those monasteries and fill them with new throngs 
of monastics, never did it regain its pristine importance. 


Js 


SO China today is the land of the “Three Truths’’: 
Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Confucianism 
is largely the religion of the learned classes, and all can- 
didates for civil service appointments are expected to 
pass an examination in its nine holy books. “Taoism 
and Buddhism are the faiths to which the masses alone 
render allegiance; but both are little more than a dark 
cloaca, swarming with spirits, devils, ghosts, vampires, 
werewolves, and green-eyed dragons. The mind of 
the Chinese peasant today is simply cluttered up with 
crowds of jostling demons. “Throughout the land one 
finds the Wu, the demon-chasing priests, eking out a 
living by uttering spells over the diseased and the 
maimed. A great dread prevails everywhere of unlucky 
days and unlucky places. Months, even years, are spent 
in a terrified hunt to find a lucky plot for the burial of 
the family dead. (In the days of anti-Buddhist agita- 
tion, many a Buddhist monastery was spared by the 


196 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


rulers of the locality solely because its presence was sup- 
posed to make the surrounding soil lucky for use as a 
graveyard.) There is a rooted conviction throughout 
the land that each place on earth has its own feng-Shut, 
its own ‘‘spirit climate.’’ No house, no grave, no shop 
can be built without first consulting the Feng-Shui ma- 
gician as to whether its proposed site is lucky... . 

And to such a sorry faith has a great old Chinese race 
descended. Fear is to blame for it, of course. It was 
fear that picked out China’s eyes, and made her blind. 
And it is fear that now flaps its ghastly wings about her, 
and makes her clutch at every spirit. Fear si 
Lear sts 





BOOK FIVE 
WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 


I. ZOROASTRIANISM 


1: The animism of early Iran—did Zoroaster ever live?—the 
legends concerning his life 2: The gospel of Zoroaster—-Good 
vs. Evil—the fire altars—the future life. 3: The ordeal of 
Zoroaster—his first converts—death. 4: The corruption of the 
gospel—ritual—burial customs—‘‘defilement’’—the priesthood 
—Mithraism. 5: The influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism 
—on Christianity—on Islam—the Parsees. 


198 


BOOK FIVE 
WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 


I, ZOROASTRIANISM 


aafitiE scene of our story shifts west- 
a ward, leaving the walled cities 
maj and rice-swamps of China and 
=i going up to the wild plateau of 
Iran in western Asia. The first 
white men in Iran, the region 
now called Persia, were of the 
Aryan stock; and their religion 
| was closely akin to that of the 
Aryans who invaded India and 
Greece. It was an animism cen- 
tering in the worship of Ashura, Anahita, Mithra, 
Haoma, and many other spirits supposed to dwell 
in natural objects. Just how or where that animism 
had its origin, no one knows; for no one knows whence 
the Aryans came. Nor do we know exactly when that 
animism came to an end, for no authentic records exist 
as to the history of Iran before the seventh century B. C. 
All that is known is that a primitive animism arose, 
flourished and then disappeared—and that for its dis- 
appearance a certain man named Zarathustra—or more 
popularly, Zoroaster—was responsible. 
But even that much is not known with indisputable 
certainty. Some scholars today are convinced that there 
never was a Zoroaster on earth. “They maintain he is 


199 








rn et 


200 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





but another of those mythical personages conjured up 
by a later generation to explain some vast religious or 
political change in its past. Moses, Mahavira, Buddha, 
Lao-Tze, Krishna, and Jesus, are similarly classed by 
them as figures devoid of genuine historicity, as mere 
fictional heroes created to dramatize and personify 
slowly matured and impersonal movements. And it 
must be admitted that there is no unchallengeable evi- 
dence to prove the existence of any one of those colossal 
figures, no carvings in enduring stone, or contemporary 
records set down on still-existing scrolls. All that re- 
mains concerning them are webs of legend and gospel 
spun by generation after generation of zealous but 
imaginative disciples. Most of those legends were on 
the loose tongues of men for ages before they were first 
set down in writing. And even after that, they no doubt 
still came in for great change at the hands of nodding or 
overconfident scribes. It is far from easy to base a 
critical faith on their florid and purely traditional 
testimony. 

Yet most reputable scholars, even of the most critical 
school, incline to agree that those webs of tradition con- 
tain at least a few threads of truth. They do so on the 
score that the acceptance of the historicity of Moses, 
Buddha, or Jesus puts less strain on our reason than 
the alternative of rejection. After all, wherever a new 
and heretical religion was founded, there must have 
been some outstanding individual to take the lead in 
founding it. It is naturally less difficult to believe that 
effects have adequate causes than to believe that they 
Havemotans iu, 

But it is only on such a basis that one can accept 


WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA _201 


the historicity of Zoroaster. It seems less incredible that 
he did exist than that he did not, for some striking 
personality must have been at least in part responsible 
for the tremendous religious transformation that came 
over the ancient people of Iran. Proof less negative 
is not at hand. ‘The Persian scriptures, the Avesta, con- 
tain a group of hymns called the Gathas which may 
have been the work of Zoroaster; but just how old 
they are, no one knows, ‘Tradition gives 660 B.C. as 
the date of the prophet’s birth; but actually it may 
even have been as early as 1000 B.c. And tradition 
gives the northwest of Iran as his birthplace, a place 
somewhere in the neighborhood of the present Armenian 
frontier; but actually it may have been at the very 
other end of the land. ‘Tradition further declares his 
birth to have been the outcome of an immaculate con- 
ception. (It is appalling, how little pride men have 
in their own species. Rarely can they bring themselves 
to believe that supreme greatness can spring from their 
own loins. No, always they must ascribe its paternity 
to the gods.) An incomprehensible trinity made up 
of the “Glory,” the “Guardian Spirit,’’ and the ‘‘Ma- 
terial Body,’’ is reputed to have been responsible for the 
appearance of Zoroaster on earth. Innumerable miracles 
occurred while he still lay in the womb of his mother 
to save him from destruction. Demons sought to hold 
off the birth, going even to the extreme of trying to 
choke the child at the very moment of its delivery. But 
in vain. [he prodigy was born, and with its very first 
breath it uttered a mighty laugh of triumph that was 
heard around all the earth. 


202 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Zoroaster was indeed 
a wonderful child—ac- 
cording to the legends. 
At a very early age he 
engaged the priests of 
the old religion in a bit- 
ter debate, and routed © 
them. And when grown 
to the age of youth, he 
took staff in hand and 
went off into the world 
in a quest for righteous- 
ness. Sore troubled by 
the sight of the evil in 
ZOROASTER SEEKS SALVATION the world, young Zoro- 
aster could find no peace 
amid the comforts of his home. So he fled. For three 
years he tramped the desert trails in search of salvation, of 
a reason for life. And failing to find it, a great gloom 
came over him. For seven years then he remained 
silent, morose and silent, while he brooded over the im- 
penetrable blackness which life had become for him. 
. . . And then of a sudden, light came. Of a sudden 
day dawned in his long-benighted soul, and once more 
he took up his staff and began to wander. But now he 
was no longer a wanderer seeking for light. No, now 
he was instead a bearer of light to all others who still 
sought for it. He went about preaching the salvation 
that had come to him, and telling how others, too, 
could attain it. Across the length and breadth of Iran 
he beat his way, hawking everywhere the gospel that 
had brought him peace. 








- WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 203 


2 


THE gospel of Zoroaster was as thoroughly native to 
Iran as its frowning mountains and desert winds. It 
was stern, rigorous, demanding. “There was in it neither 
the florid confidence revealed in the Vedas, nor the livid 
despair shown in the Upanishads. Rather there was 
in it a steel-gray valor that could know life for what it 
really was, and yet could continue to hope. Religions 
are so varied largely because the earth contains such 
varied lands and climates. Religion, as we have 
already seen, is the technique wherewith man seeks to 
conquer his environment; and therefore it must neces- 
sarily vary according to the locale in which it is em- 
ployed. ‘The religion of the overabundant valley of 
the Indus could not very well be anything but one of 
ease. In the intolerable furnace of the Ganges Valley, 
the religion could hardly be anything else than one of 
hopelessness. And on the stern plateau of Iran, it 
could not but be one of fierce courage and struggle. 
For Iran was a land of perpetual struggle, of perpetual 
warfare against wind and ice and wilderness. Over- 
whelming contrasts faced its inhabitants: a great salt 
desert prostrate with heat at the base of encircling snow- 
peaked mountains. And the religion there conceived 
and proclaimed by Zoroaster was likewise one of con- 
trasts. According to it, all the universe was one great 
Wattle-ground on which Good and Bad struggled for 
mastery. On the one side was Ahura Mazda, the Wise 
Spirit, supported by his six vassals: Good Thought, 
Right Law, Noble Government, Holy Character, Health, 
and Immortality. Pitted against him was Angra 





204 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Mainyu, the Lie Demon, supported by most of the old 
gods of the popular faith, And midway between the 
two contending armies stood man. It was absolutely 
incumbent upon man to choose on which side he would 
battle: on the side of Good, Purity, and Light, or of 
Evil, Filth, and Darkness. There could be no slightest 
compromise or evasion. One had to enlist on one side 
or the other, just as the beasts, the winds, the very 
plants were enlisted. 

And once each man had chosen his side, then his 
every word and deed had its effect on the fortunes of 
the war. It was not prayer but work that was demanded 
of the worshippers of Ahura Mazda. Their noblest 
act of devotion was the performance of a task like the 
irrigating of a desert patch or the bridging of a tor- 
rential stream. Ahura Mazda was in essence the spirit 
of civilization, and the only worship acceptable to him 
was the spreading of order and stability. He who de- 
clared himself on the side of Ahura Mazda was in duty 
bound to devote all his days to fighting the battle for 
Light. No mercy was to be shown by him to the enemy, 
be that enemy some weed or beast or savage from the 
‘Turanian wilds. Ahura Mazda was the god of justice, 
not of mercy, and in his warfare he neither gave nor 
received quarter. In his service there was no room for 
sentimentality; one had to be hard and unbending. The 
one great law of ethics was to give aid to those—and 
only those—who were also on the side of Good, and 
never to do them the slightest injury. Even beneficent 
animals such as those that destroyed rodents, snakes, 
and other evil creatures, were considered holy and de- 
serving of aid. The penalty for killing a hedgehog was 


WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 205 





nine lives spent in hell; for killing an otter it was— 
well, to begin with—ten thousand lashes with a horse- 
whip. An inviolable sanctity was attached to the life 
of all domestic animals, especially cows, dogs, and sheep. 
To care for them and help multiply their number was 
the devoutest act of faith ... 

It was an extraordinary religion, this of the ancient 
prophet of Iran. It preached a technique of coping 
with the evils of the universe that was totally at vari- 
ance with anything ever before conceived by man. 
Zoroaster had no patience with the old gods, Mithra, 
Anahita, Haoma, and the rest, and denounced them 
all as demons. The very word deva, which had aiways 
meant “‘gods,’” he made to connote ‘“‘devils.’”’ (Both 
connotations somehow found their way into the stream 
of European languages, and that is why there is still 
today so close a likeness in sound between “‘deviltry”’ 
and ‘“‘divinity.””) ... Only one heathen rite did 
Zoroaster take over, and that was the veneration of fire. 
(Some say he came of a family of ancient fire-priests. ) 
But according to the prophet, fire was not a god to be 
worshipped as it may have been worshipped by the 
earliest Iranians. No, it was a mere symbol of Ahura 
Mazda. Fire-altars were to be erected solely as a testi- 
monial to the veneration in which the “Wise Spirit’’ 
was held. Zoroaster may himself have gone about the 
land erecting such altars and reciting the hymns called 
the Gathas what time he attended the holy flames. 
But he made it clear that the erecting or serving of a 
fire altar was not the sole or even the chief approach to 


the ‘‘Wise Spirit.” The chief approach to him was, 


through daily toil. ‘“‘He who sows corn, sows religion.” 


f 


206 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Laziness was a thing of the Devil. Every morning 
the demon of laziness whispers in the ear of man: 
“Sleep on, poor man. It is not time yet.’’ But he 
alone who arises the first, declared Zoroaster, would be 
the first to enter Paradise. 

No one was left in doubt that there was indeed a 
Paradise. And there was also a Hell. ‘The true serv- 
ants of Ahura Mazda would as surely enter the one, 
it was believed, as the slaves of Angra Mainyu would 
be hurled into the other. And ultimately the two realms 
would meet to engage in a terrible climacteric struggle. 
The long protracted war between Good and Evil would 
come to a close in “The Affair.”” Then for a season 
thick darkness would cover the face of the earth, and 
the whole universe would quake with the shock of the 
encounter. Fire and death would swirl over all, and 
there would be gnashing of teeth and dreadful wailing. 
The terror in the world would be “‘like the terror of the 
lamb when it is devoured by the wolf.’ ... But at 
last the fury would abate, and slowly, wearily, almost 
ready to perish because of the severity of the ordeal, 
Ahura Mazda would emerge—the victor. Then all 
the hills and mountains would melt and pour down 
over the earth, and ali men would have to pass through 
the boiling lava. “To the just and righteous, however, 
that lava would be as warm milk; only to the wicked 
would it be scalding and fatal. “The just and righteous 
would wade through it with laughter on their lips, re- 
joicing over a victory so well won. And the earth 
thereafter would be an everlasting Paradise wherein 
there would be no more mountains or deserts or wild 
beasts or savages. [he Kingdom of Ahura Mazda 








Witt ben eb PIN ROSIN I RERSIA 207 


would have reached its consummation, and all would 
be well thenceforth forever and aye... . 


3 


SUCH, as best the scholars can make it out, was the 
religion which Zoroaster sought to bring to his fellow 
Iranians. Perhaps it was not so free of heathenisms, 
not merely so exalted and superbly spiritual, as the 
scholars have pictured it. Save on the basis of the 
miraculous, one finds it nigh impossible to explain the 
sprouting of so altogether fair a religion before the night 
of barbarism had yet quite lifted in Iran. But however 
much less noble it may have been than it is now pic- 


ARABIAN 





ye aie = 


THE WANDERINGS OF ZOROASTER 


208 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


tured, still it was far too noble for its time. Tradition 
declares that for ten harrowing years the appeal of 
Zoroaster was like a voice in the wilderness. None 
would give ear to the man, or, giving ear, could make 
him out. Solitary and misunderstood he went about, 
harried by the heathen priests, imprisoned by heathen 
princes. More than once he cried out desperately to 
his God: 


To what land shall I turn, 

Or whither shall I go? 

Far am I from kinsmen, 

Distant from friends; 

Foully am I dealt with by peasants and kings. 
Unto Thee I cry, O Wise Spirit, 

Unto Thee I cry, Give me Help! 


He needed help, did poor Zoroaster, for his was no 
light task. It was a day when the conversion of a 
people could come only as a result of converting their 
prince—and princes were not willing to be converted. 
After ten long years of struggle, the outcome seemed 
altogether hopeless. When one winter's night he was 
refused shelter even for his “‘two steeds shivering with 
cold,’” a great temptation to surrender almost tore him 
from his faith. “The Lie Demon—so goes the legend— 
took hold of Zoroaster and tried to shake him from his 
devotion. ‘“‘Hold!’’ cried the Lie Demon. ‘“‘Dare not 
to destroy my handiwork! Remember, thou art the 
son of thy mother, and thy mother worshipped me. 
Renounce the right religion of Mazda, and obtain at 
last the favor of kings.’’ Fierce then waxed the struggle 
in the soul of the tired prophet; but in the end the truth 





WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 209 


was victor. ‘‘No!’’ the prophet cried back to the Lie 
Demon. ‘I shall not renounce the right religion of 
Mazda—not though life and limb and soul be torn 
SSUNCCEL Wh tetis- 

And soon thereafter Zoroaster made his first convert. 
He was not a prince, however—merely one of his own 
cousins. Still, it was a start—enough of a start to keep 
the prophet at his task for two years more. And then 
at last a real prince was converted, a mighty ruler 
named Vishtasp who became the Constantine of the 
new faith. A church militant was formed, and holy 
warts were waged against the Turanian savages on the 
north. “Those Turanians were wild bedouin raiders 





THE TURANIANS WERE BEDOUIN RAIDERS 





210 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


who made the life of the Iranian farmers a nightmare, 
and they seemed to Zoroaster the personification of all 
Ahura Mazda hated. The prophet waged war with- 
out mercy against them. “I am he that tortureth the 
sinners,’ he declared, ‘“‘and he that avengeth the right- 
eous. [hough I bring bitter woe, still must I do that 
which Ahura Mazda declareth right.’’ Yet for all his 
unsparing zeal, Zoroaster seems not to have been narrow. 
“If even among the Turanians there arise those who 
help the settlements of Piety,’’ he declared, “‘behold 
even with them shall the Lord have his habitation.’’ 
According to tradition, one of Zoroaster’s most 
loyal and trusted followers was a Turanian named 
Prvanai view 

Such was the gospel by which Zoroaster lived—and 
for which he died. For it may be that he did die in its 
ministry. Legend has it that Zoroaster was struck down 
while he stood ministering at an altar of fire, brought to 
book by one of those heathen priests whose worship he 
bad srouteds i. 0 


4 


WE may not be quite certain as to just what was the 
teaching of Zoroaster himself; but there can be no doubt 
as to what it became at the hands of his successors. It 
degenerated. “The faith voiced in those prophetic hymns 
called the Gathas was too nobly exacting, too exaltedly 
strenuous to last in its original purity. It was too bright 
for the weak eyes of ordinary men to gaze on steadily, 
too vast for their little hands to grasp. So very soon 
its brightness was dulled by the streaming breath 
of sedentary theologians, while its vastness was eater 


WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 211 


away by the attrition of greedy priests. In the begin- 
ning, Ahura Mazda may have been but a spirit, a dream, 
an ideal. He may have been little more than the name 
that stood for all that was good in the world, a convic- 
tion around which to build one’s life. But a later genera- 
tion made Ahura Mazda the name of a person, a super- 
human being with not a few crudely human attributes. 
Ormuzd, he was called. . . . And Angra Mainyu, the 
Lie Demon, the name that stood for all that was evil in 
the world, also became 
the name of a person. 
Ahriman, this person 
was later called, and he 
was then thought to be 
not merely the Agent of 
Evil, but its original 
creator. e. 2) Phen six 
spirits, Good Thought, 
Right Law, and the 
others, which Zoroaster 
had thought of as quali- 
ties serving Ahura 
Mazda, became very per- 
sonal angels, and were 
increased in number 
tromunsix to. S1X ty, 
seventy, a thousand, ten 
thousand! And opposed 
to them were set up 
many thousands of 
devils. ... All the Bagge | 
winning simplicity of THE PROPHET OF IRAN 





alte THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Zoroaster’s vague ideas was bit by bit destroyed by be- 
dizening theologians. 

But this elaboration of Zoroaster’s stark doctrine was 
not nearly so tragic as the perversion that ensued. “The 
poetry and truth of Zoroaster became prose and error 
at the hands of those who came after him. If he said 
‘be pure,’’ meaning clean with righteousness, straight- 
way they imagined with their literal minds that he meant 
be ritually pure. Currency was given to the most ex- 
travagant notions of taboo and “‘defilement,’’ and to the 
absurdest rules for their removal. Certain things were 
declared to be “holy’’ and certain other things “‘un- 
holy’’; and ne’er the twain dared be brought together. 
That led of course, to all manner of complications. For 
instance, among the things considered “‘holy’”’ were fire, 
water, and earth; while a corpse was thought to be 
dreadfully “unholy.’’ ‘The disposal of the dead there- 
fore became a serious problem. Since the corpse might 
not be buried or burnt, or drowned, there was nothing 
left but to expose it on a high ‘““Tower of Silence,’’ 
where it could be devoured by the vultures. Elaborate 
precautions had to be taken lest a drop of rain touch the 
dead body, and funerals were permitted only on dry 
days. Professional bearers, who took the most scrupu- 
lous care to guard themselves against ‘‘defilement,’’ car- 
ried the corpse to the top of this tower. There it was 
left until the carrion birds had made an end of their 
ghoulish feast, and only after three days of exposure 
were the bleached bones cast into a pit. To this day the 
Parsees, the descendants of the old Zoroastrians, stil 
dispose of their dead in that way. . . 

Not merely corpses, but all manner of other things 








WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA 213 


were considered taboo and “‘unclean.’’ So many indeed 
were they, and so difficult to think of, that success in 
the task of avoiding all ‘‘defilement’”’ became practically 
hopeless. ‘Therefore, in order to be on the safe side, 
it was forbidden that any religious task be essayed unless 
the celebrant first ‘“‘purified’’ himself as though from an 
actual and definitely remembered ‘‘defilement.’’ Cow’s 
urine was considered the most potent ‘‘purifier’’ and 
those who desired to cleanse themselves ritually had to 
swab themselves with the stuff six times a day every 
third day, for nine days. They had to rub down one 
member after another with it, until finally the demon 
of ‘‘defilement’’ was driven all the way from the head to 
the feet. The point of exit for the demon was always 
the big toe of the left foot, and when ejected thence, it 
went off with a shriek to the north where all the demons 
—and once all the Turanians—dwelled. Every time a 
man touched a corpse, or a menstrual woman, or any 
other tabooed thing, he had to go through that revolting 
process of ritual purification all over again. ‘That is 
still the law among orthodox Parsees. . . . 

Now the growth of such a ritual law was almost 
as natural and inevitable as the growth of lichens on 
a rock. Only the great souls, the sages and prophets, 
have ever been able to find salvation in a religion naked 
of ceremonial adornment. Ordinary men even today 
are incapable of comprehending abstract ideas. Before 
a thought can become real to them it must be concretized 
and made obvious through symbols or symbolic action. 
That is why the career of every prophetically founded 
religion on earth has been a career of more or less pro- 
gressive frustration. What happened in Jainism, 





214 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Buddhism, and Taoism happened also in Zoroastrian- 
ism. “The prophet was succeeded by priests, by ordinary 
men of more than ordinary talent who attempted to 
“organize” the truth their master had uttered. And 
tragedy was then inevitable. In the first place, those 
priests were incapable of really comprehending their 
master’s truth. ‘Ichey were men of talent, not of genius; 
and talent is not enough for the full understanding of 
a great gospel. In the second place, even had they been 
! Bila able to grasp the 
prophet’s truth, they 
could not possibly have 
organized it. For truth, © 
by its very nature, is in- 

capable of being organ- 
ized. It belongs gene- 
tically to the realm of 
the ideal, and it can no 
more be regimented than 
the rainbow can be hung 
with clothes. Conse- 
quently there was no 
avoiding frustration. 
The priests reached out 
to lay hold of Zoro- 
aster’s truth, but their 
blunt fingers could close 
only on falsehood. Eagerly they strained to light their 
brands at the brave little flame which he held up against 
the dark swirling immensities of fear; but they succeeded 


only in getting their brands to smoke and crackle in | 
shamed impotence. 





THE AHRIMAN DRAGON 





WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA aie 





But though the priests failed to preserve Zoroaster’s 
gospel they succeeded all too well in preserving them- 
selves. Indeed, the more they failed with the one, the 
more they succeeded with the other. For the more they 
made salvation a prize that could be won only by strict 
observance of the ritual, the more they made themselves 
the donors of salvation. No doubt that was why the 
ritualization of the religion was carried to such inordi- 
nate lengths by the priests. It paid. It gave those 
priests enormous power over the populace, and enabled 
them to establish themselves as a permanent caste in 
Iran. They organized themselves into an hereditary 
order, and at one juncture even instituted a papacy in 
the land. They were called the Magi, and their fame 
as necromancers later spread through the world.? Their 
chief function was to officiate at the regular temple and 
household services. Masked with thick veils to keep 
their breath from polluting the holy flames, they served 
at the fire-altars five times each day. With like punctilio 
they served also at the haoma-altars which Zoroaster 
in his day had tried most strenuously to destroy. 
Haoma (called Soma in India), an intoxicating vege- 
table extract, was considered highly sacred among the 
primitive Aryans, and was used in the earliest religious 
rites. Evidently its hold on the masses was so firm 
that despite Zoroaster’s reform it was able to continue 
as a sacramental property. In the priestly law-books 
we find detailed accounts of just how the haoma rites 
were performed after the prophet died. “I'wigs of the 
sacred plant were pounded in a mortar; the heady juice 





1JIt is from their name, Magi (pronounced with the “‘g’’ soft and the 
“7’’ long, as in ‘‘gibe’’), that we get our words magic and magician. 


216 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


was mixed with milk and holy water; it was strained; 
and then it was swallowed by the priests. (A potent 
cocktail it must have made!) At one time it took eight 
priests to perform the rite, one to recite the Gathas, 
one to pound the haoma, one to mix the juice with the 
milk, four others to stand by and help, and one to watch 
over all! 

But the haoma rites were not the only relics of the 
old heathenism that returned after Zoroaster’s death. 
Many of the old fallen gods, too, were dragged back into 
fashion—Mithra and Anahita and others. ‘The very 
Gathas of Zoroaster were corrupted by interpolation, or 
at least misinterpretation, so that they might give the 
impression that the prophet himself had commanded 
the worship of those gods. . . . Mithra especially be- 
came popular; and as we have already seen, his cult 
later spread beyond the borders of Persia into Babylonia, 
Greece, and finally into Rome itself. For at least two 
centuries that cult struggled with Christianity for the 
dominance of the Roman Empire. And when in the 
end it was vanquished, its place was taken almost im- 
mediately by Manichaeism, a religion founded in the 
third century by the Persian prophet, Mani, who was 
crucified by the Magian priests as a heretic. . . . 


5 


BUT the importance of Zoroastrianism has always 
been qualitative rather than quantitative. Its highest 
significance lies in the influence it has exercised on the 
development of at least three other great religions. 
First, it made contributions to Judaism, for between 
538 B.C. (when the Persians under Cyrus captured 








WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA ___217 


Babylonia and set free the Jews exiled in that land) and 
330 B. Cc. (when the Persian Empire was destroyed by 
Alexander) the Jews were directly under the suzerainty 
of the Zoroastrians. And it was from these suzerains 
that the Jews first learnt to believe in an Ahriman, a 
personal devil, whom they called in Hebrew, Satan. 
Possibly from them, too, the Jews first learnt to believe 
in a heaven and hell, and in a Judgment Day for each 
individual. 

Zoroastrianism had developed quite fantastic ideas 
about the Judgment Day which the prophet had declared 
to be the consummation of all things. In the first place, 
his professed followers had grown a little tired of wait- 
ing for this universal “‘Affair’’ that Zoroaster had 
prophesied. “They had begun to take more stock in an 
“affair’’ for each individual, a dread day of trial that was 
due immediately after death. [he soul of each dead 
person, it came to be believed, was convoyed up to a fate- 
ful bridge and then commanded to march forward. If 
it was the soul of a righteous man, then the bridge 
opened up into a broad thoroughfare over which the 
soul marched straight on to the Heaven of Ormuzd. But 
if it was the soul of a wicked man, lo, the bridge con- 
tracted till it was as narrow as the edge of a sharp scimi- 
tar, and the guilty soul was sent hurtling down into the 
foul Hell of Ahriman. . . . And that naive idea was 
taken over into Judaism, which until then had known 
of nothing more than a vague “‘pit’’ called sheol, into 
which all souls at death were cast indiscriminately. 

And the Zoroastrian picture of the ultimate “‘Affair’’ 
for all the universe also left its impress on Jewish think- 
ing. Scholars today are fairly agreed that most of the 





218 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Biblical and Apocryphal accounts of what would hap- 
pen in ‘‘the end of days,’”’ all the wild apocalypses from 
Daniel through and beyond Revelation, were inspired at 
least in part by Persian eschatology. 

Through Judaism, the religion of Persia left its mark 
also on Christianity; and not merely through Judaism, 
but also through Mithraism. When we come to tell 
the story of the rise of Christianity we shall have to refer 
at some length to the many compromises with Mithraism 
which seem to have been made by the victorious faith. 

Very directly, also, Zoroastrianism influenced the re- 
ligion preached by Mohammed. Many ideas set down 
in the Koran reveal that influence; and even more of the 
ideas set down in later Moslem writings. . . . 

And in our very own day we find a modernized form 
of Zoroaster’s faith being preached by Mr. H. G. 
Wells! .. 

Only by virtue of this pervading influence of its 
ideas can Zoroastrianism be called a world religion to- 
day. Its nominal confessors are few, very few, in num- 
ber. ‘They were mercilessly persecuted and almost ex- 
terminated when the Mohammedans swept into Persia 
in the eighth century; and they have been persistently 
oppressed from that day on. Only about nine thou- 
sand of their posterity are left now in all the land! 

But there is a significant colony of them in India, in 
all about ninety thousand Zoroastrians who dwell in 
and around Bombay. There they seem to be a veritable 
leaven in the whole population, and their importance is 
far out of proportion to their numbers. They are 
known there as the Parsees (really, the Persians), and 
their culture, honesty, and benevolence are bywords in 


WHAT HAPPENED IN PERSIA Zig 


all India. Even their present multitudinous rules of 
ritual ‘“‘purity’’ have failed to smother the fires of faith 
which Zoroaster lighted unnumbered centuries ago. The 
Parsees are still in their way servants of Ahura Mazda, 
warriors for Right in the battle which is life. A tiny 
minority, forever harassed and scorned, nevertheless they 
are today among the very noblest of mankind... . 

By worldly standards, Zoroastrianism failed. It was 
so overwhelmed by Christianity and Mohammedanism 
that today it is the size of a forgotten denomination. 
But by truer standards, Zoroastrianism triumphed. It 
triumphed as have few other faiths on earth, for its fire, 
though often on the altars of strange gods, still illumines 
much of the world... . 





GOOK SIX 


GRRT NRPPENED 
IN (SRREL 


a — 
se == 
SSS 


— 


-__ 


Ce 
nr eee 





Tr 


BOOK SIX 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 


JUDAISM 


1: The cradle of the Hebrew people—the lure of the Fertile 
Crescent—Egypt and the Exodus. 2: Moses—the covenant 
with Yahveh. 3: How the nature of Yahveh changed in Canaan. 
4: The political history of the Hebrews. >» ih w: of 
the prophets. 6: Amos—-Hosea—TIsaiah—-Micah—Jeremiah— 
Yahveh becomes God. 7: The spiritual exaltation of Israel— 
the Messianic Promise—its influence during the Babylonian 
Exile—Deutero-Isaiah. 8: The rise of the priests—their in- 
fluence—the new prophets—the Destruction of Jerusalem—the 
Messianic Dream again. 9: The rise of the rabbis—the Wall 
of Law—Judaism today—Zionism—the goy-fearing people— 
Messianism, the heart of Judaism. 


222 


BOOK SIX 
WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 


I. JUDAISM 


m: N EGYPT thirty-five hundred 
mi years ago there was already a 
i great civilization, and magnifi- 
cent temples were being built 
there to the glory of the animal- 
headed gods. In Babylonia there 
was already a knowledge of writ- 
ing, and in India the Rig-Veda 
was already old. The Chinese by 
w———i that time had so long been estab- 

—— ieee lished in their land that they 
imagined they had always lived in it; and _ the 
Minoans had already profited by a full thousand years 
of peace. But the Hebrews, that little people destined 
to play so large a part in the drama of world civiliza- 
tion—they were still half-savages homeless in the 
desert. 

Like the Babylonians and Phoenicians, the Hebrews 
were Semites, for their cradle-land was that vast wil- 
derness we call the Arabian Desert. Thirty-five hundred 
years ago the Hebrews were but half-savage tribesmen 
who lived off the bedraggled flocks and herds which 
they drove from one oasis to another. And their 
religion, like the religion of all other primitive peoples, 
was a barbaric animism. “They imagined that all objects 

223 





Lo THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


around them were possessed of terrible spirits, and their 
worship was no more than a dark magic-mongering. 
Fear was very mighty in the bones of those first Hebrews, 
for life for them was brief and brutally hard. By day 
their world quivered with the heat of the sun, and by 
night it shivered because of the cold of the wind. Per- 
petually their world, the desert, was parched, wind- 
stormy, and terrifying beyond words... . 

There seemed but one way of escape from the evil 
which was their life, and that was through migration 
from the desert. Far to the north there was a great 
half-circle ef verdant soil made up of the valleys of the 
Tigris and Euphrates, and the coast of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea. Modern historians call it the ‘‘Fertile 
Crescent,’’ and it was the Eden of the desert nomads, 
the Paradise, the Promised Land. Generation after 
generation those nomads struggled their way up to its 
borders, and then by brute force beat their way in. The 
Fertile Crescent seems never to have been without in- 
habitants ready to fight off all newcomers. Before the 
dawn of history it was populated in large part by non- 
Semitic peoples called the Sumerians and the Hittites. 
But later it became a region belonging almost exclusively 
to Semites. Certain tribes out of the desert inundated 
the eastern tip of the Crescent and became the Babylon- 
ians. Others smashed their way into the middle of the 
Crescent, and became the Arameans. Still others con- 
quered the coastal plain, and became the Phoenicians 
and Canaanites. 

There is reason to believe that the Hebrews, when 
their turn came to invade the Crescent, tried first to use 
the eastern tip as the gate of entrance. Only later did 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 22,5 


they try their fortune in Canaan in the west. (The 
tradition that Abraham—evidently a tribal sheikh who 
led one of the first sorties into Canaan—came from 
“Ur of the Chaldees,’’ may have that much basis in 
fact.) Perhaps for many centuries the Hebrews roamed 
about on the borders of the verdant region, awaiting 
their chance to breakin. ‘Time after time they may have 
made desperate lunges, 
murdering and pillaging 
until they were well in- 
side the Crescent, and 
then recoiling beneath 
the blows of the re- 
covered natives. They 
seem to have gone 
through such experi- 
ences first in Babylonia, 
then in Haran, later in 
Canaan, and finally in 
Egypt. But out of 
Egypt they were never 
ejected; they fled! For 
when they broke their 
way into Egypt, they 
got more than they bargained for. They had entered the 
land in search for food—but instead they got slavery. 
From loose-footed bedouins they had been violently 
changed there into sweating laborers who in chain gangs 
were forced to build pyramids for the mummified bodies 
of dead emperors. It was only by taking advantage of a 
moment when Egypt was desperately trying to fight off 
hordes of savage invaders from Libya and pirates from 


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226 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


the Aegean Islands, that the Hebrews managed to 
escape. ‘They fled into the wilderness, roamed there as 
in olden days, and finally made still another lunge at the 
Fertile Crescent. And that time they managed not 
merely to squeeze into the coveted region, but also to 
stay on in it. 


2 


IT was out of crisis of the flight from Egypt that the 
beginnings of a distinctive Hebrew religion arose. Be- 
fore that time the faith of the Hebrews must have been 
quite like that of most other Semite bedouins prowling 
in the desert. It must have been a vague and inconstant 
animism in which the spirits of various mountains and 
heavenly bodies and oases were placated with sacrifices 
and spells. Not until the Exodus did it become a defi- 
nite and differentiated cult. 

The leader in that Exodus was a man named Moses, 
one of the most fascinating and bewildering of the great 
men of antiquity. Tradition has woven so many 
threadbare legends around his name that many scholars 
today are moved to doubt his very existence. But, as 
in the case of Zoroaster and Jesus and the other ancient 
prophets, it seems sounder to accept the historicity of 
Moses than to reject it. Not the historicity of the rock- 
splitting, Pentateuch-writing, priest-loving Moses of 
tradition, of course. “That is quite obviously a piece of 
propagandist fiction concocted by the priesthood of a 
far later day. No, the historicity only of some daring 
primitive Hebrew who managed to prod his brethren 
into rebellion against the Egyptians, to appoint himself 
their chieftain, to weld them into a unit by giving them 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL ZLA 


a god, and finally to get them ready for another 
desperate effort to enter the Fertile Crescent. Whether 
he was ever found amid bulrushes by an Egyptian 
princess, or saw bushes burn unconsumed, or actually 
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THE EXODUS 


and seas to dry lands—all that is irrelevant. What 
alone is relevant is the elemental task which Moses 
accomplished: the giving to the Hebrews of a god. For 
thereby he founded what was destined to become one 
of the most exalted and influential of the religions of 
ali mankind. Over eight hundred millions of people— 


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WHAT THE HEBREWS BUILT IN EGYPT 


228 


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WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 229 





full half the population of this believing world—claim 
to cherish a religion that in definite respects grew out of 
the religion proclaimed by Moses! 


It was far from a perfect faith—this cult instituted 
by Moses. One must remember that it was founded 
over thirty-two hundred years ago, by the chieftain of 
a horde of marauding desperadoes just come up out of 
bondage. It was just as crude and savage as were the 
Hebrews themselves. At its root lay the idea that there 
was but one god—for the Hebrews. For other tribes 
there might be other gods, but for the Hebrews there 
was only Yahveh. This Yahveh (or Jehovah, as his 
name is usually mispronounced) was probably the 
spirit dwelling in a certain desert volcano called Sinai 
or Horeb; and from time immemorial he had been wor- 
shipped by a bedouin tribe called the Kenites. Now 
Moses, according to tradition, had once dwelt among 
the Kenites, and had married the daughter of their chief 
priest. When it became necessary for his band of run- 
away Hebrews to be provided with a god, it was there- 
fore only natural for Moses to choose Yahveh. He 
took his forlorn followers to the very foot of the Holy 
Mountain of Yahveh located somewhere in the desert, 
and solemnly committed them there to this god. A 
covenant was entered into; a holy contract binding the 
Hebrews to worship Yahveh, and Yahveh to favor the 
Hebrews. Ten commandments were given as the basis 
of the worship of the deity; and it was understood that 
so long as they were observed, the Hebrews could be 
assured of his divine protection. An “‘ark’’ was built 
as a haven for the roving spirit of Yahveh—it probably 
was a sort of tribal fetish—and the Hebrews carried it 


230 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


at. the head of their columns in every sortie. It cleaved 
the fear that walled their way, and opened wide a path 
to triumph. With this ‘‘ark’’ bearing the spirit of 





IN THE WILDERNESS 


Yahveh in their van, the Hebrews beat their way back 
into the Crescent. When at last they managed to cross 
the Jordan and wrest from the Canaanites the little 
land ‘“‘flowing with milk and honey,’ Yahveh, the 
spirit of a desert volcano, was still their chief deity. 


3 


BUT in Canaan the nature of Yahveh was subjected 
to a great change—for a great change came over his 
followers. “The nomad Hebrews became farmers; from 
tending sheep they turned to ploughing fields. And 
since a god is worshipped only because he helps make 
life less troublous and insecure, because with his aid men 
believe they can more successfully fight off fear and 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL Zork 


death, therefore he must change with every change in 
their life and needs. Yahveh, who had been chosen 
originally because he seemed able to help men wrestle 
with the terrors of the desert, was forced to reveal new 
abilities once his followers settled in a fertile land. He 
had to do that, or die. | 

Almost he did die. Throughout the books of Judges, 
Samuel, and Kings, we see signs of the fierce war of the 
gods that ensued. Hebrew conquered Canaanite far 
more easily than Yahveh conquered Baal. Indeed, 
though Yahveh did triumph in the end, still he never 
quite crushed his old enemy. ‘The Bible declares: 
“And they served idols whereof Yahveh had said to 
them: ‘Ye shall not do this thing.’ ’’ Long centuries 
after the first settlement in Palestine, we still find 
Hebrew peasants worshipping the Baalim on the “‘high 
places,” and Hebrew kings passing their children 
“through the fire’ to Moloch. The licentious festivals 
of the Canaanitish cults were made part and parcel 
of the cult of Yahveh, and these agricultural rites 
became dominant in what had once been altogether a 
bedouin religion. 

It is now well established that the so-called ‘‘Five 
Books of Moses’’ are a compilation of different docu- 
ments belonging to many different centuries. When 
these various documents are separated and chronologi- 
cally rearranged, we can see in them quite clearly how 
gradual and tortuous was the development of Israel’s 
religion. The final idea of Yahveh accepted by the 
Hebrews was not the product of a sudden revelation 
but of a gradual evolution. Moses did no more (but 
it was enough!) than preach one great basic doctrine: 


25D THIS BELIEVING WORLD 
that Israel belonged to Yahveh. His Yahveh was, of 


course, far from a gentle, loving, merciful deity. Had 
he been that sort, he would have been utterly useless to 
the straggling band of fugitives and desperadoes whom 
Moses was leading through the wilderness. Yahveh 
had to be bloody, hard, vindictive in character—even 
as was the life of his worshippers. He had to be a Lord 
of Hosts, a god of battle, or else he could be of no value 
to the embattled hosts of Israel. Only later was Yah- 
veh thought of as a god of mercy and love. Only 
through the preaching of a long line of mighty prophets 
did this Thunderer out of the desert, this ruthless Yah- 
veh of a nation of ruthless marauders, become God. . . . 


4 


IT is not easy to tell in measured and dispassionate 
terms of the transformation wrought by those prophets. 
Above the ruck of fussy priests and slavish worshippers 
those pioneers of ethical thought stand out so majestic, 
so tremendous, that it is hard to speak of them save in 
hyperbole. Had it not been for those few prophets, 
Israel would today be no more a name than Idumea or 
Philistia. Had it not been for their insight and courag- 
eous labor, Yahveh would have been no more to civili- 
zation than Baal-Melkart or Dagon. Sons in blood to 
Moses, brethren in spirit to Ikhnaton, Zoroaster, 
Buddha, and Lao-Tze, they loom up in the story of re- 
ligion as veritable supermen. 

The history of Israel as a political unit was like the 
history of most of the other little peoples of antiquity. 
In brief it was this: Under the leadership of tribal 
priests and sheikhs—‘‘judges’’ they are called in the 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 233 


Bible—the Hebrews first clawed their way into Canaan, 
and then settled there. The exigencies of defense 
against their enemies compelled the tribes to unite under 
a king. For a while they were highly successful to- 
gether in warfare, and under David they actually carved 
out what was almost an empire. But the waste and 
extravagance of Solomon, who seemed bent on imitating 
the ostentatious despots of Egypt and Babylonia, 
brought swift ruin. <A revolution ensued, and its close 
saw the land divided into two kingdoms: Israel and 
Judah. Israel was situated in the north, and Judah 
in the south—and in the years that followed, these two 
tiny kingdoms simply bled themselves to death in in- 
cessant warfare. Canaan, their land, lay on the high- 
road between the empires of the East and West, and 
invasions by world-conquerors and trading kings were 
a never-ending source of misfortune. “The Hebrews, 
thus harassed from without as well as within, could not 
hold out for long. First the northern kingdom, Israel, 
went down to defeat, and its population was taken 
captive and deported to Assyria and Media. (That 
was in 722 B. C., the year from which we date the “‘loss’’ 
of the Ten Tribes.) Then, in 586 B.C., it was the 
turn of the Kingdom of Judah; its population, too, was 
taken captive and scattered to the far ends of the Orient. 
And with that debacle the whole story of the Hebrews 
came to an end—almost. 


5 


BUT then something happened, something extraor- 
dinary, almost miraculous. The surrender and an- 
nihilation of little kingdoms was a common incident 


234. THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


ASIA fusor 





THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE EMPIRES 


in the ancient world. “The Philistines and the Phoeni- 
cians and the rest of Judah’s small neighbors were all 
of them sooner or later drowned in that vortex which 
was—and is—the Orient. But miraculously, Judah 
cheated that fate. It was harried and butchered, con- 
quered and deported—but of all ancient peoples it alone 
was never destroyed. Even though one can explain 
that phenomenon, it still remains a miracle, for the 
explanation itself can hardly be explained. Even though 
one can glibly say that Judah’s survival was due entirely 
to the might of her faith, and that the might of her 
faith was due entirely to her prophets, yet how is one 
to account for her prophets? .. . 

The religion of Israel, as we have already said, was 
a result not of a sudden revelation, but of a gradual 
evolution. In the beginning it was crude and simple, 
a mere cajoling of a desert spirit with sacrifices of blood 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 230 


and flesh. “There was as yet no established sanctuary 
and no professional priesthood. Only after Israel came 
under the influence of the long-‘‘civilized’’ Canaanites 
and Babylonians, did an elaborate ritual arise and 
along with it a powerful hierarchy. And that foreign 
influence did not reach its ascendency until after the 
Babylonian Exile. So that the saving power of the re- 
ligion—that power which made it at all possible for the 
Jews to survive the Exile—could not have proceeded 
from its priestly side. No, the sacrificial cult in Israel 
was not the cause, but rather one inevitable accom- 
paniment of Israel’s survival. “The real cause was the 
prophetic spirit that had been breathed into the people. 

Of the earliest Palestinian prophets, of Samuel, 
Nathan, Adonijah, Elijah, and the rest, we have little 
record left save legends. “They seem to have been wild 
evangelists who went up and down the land exhorting 
the people to remain true to Yahveh. (The Hebrew 
word nevi-im, “‘prophets,’” may originally have meant 
“shouters.”’) They were the ‘‘troublers in Israel’’ who 
were forever denouncing the kings for their wickedness, 
the priests for their venality, and the people for their 
transgression of the ancient covenant with Yahveh. 
Again and again they were imprisoned and put to death; 
but nevertheless they kept right on. In the trying days 
when the Hebrews were being made over from shep- 
herds into farmers, from tent-dwellers into town-folk, 
it was those prophets alone who kept the people from 
being utterly demoralized in the process. We have 
already referred to the devastating effect of agricultural 
“civilization’’ when it first is taken up by erstwhile 
nomads. If that effect worked extraordinarily small 








236 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





havoc among the Hebrews, it was solely because of the 
vigilance and zeal of their early nevi-im. Those 
prophets were the old desert conscience incarnate. “They 
stood unfalteringly against the Canaanite goddesses 
with their obscenities and lustful rites; they showed no 
tolerance to the similar cults of Phoenicia, Assyria, 
and Babylonia. They were Yahveh’s invincible 
champions in his hard fight to hold the Hebrews from 
worshipping Baal, Moloch, Ashtoreth, and all the 
other gods and goddesses of Asia Minor. 


6 


BUT although the prophets labored so intensely to 
keep the old Yahveh on his throne, they did more to 
destroy him than even the priests of the rival deities. 
When they were done keeping him on the throne, he 
was no longer the same Yahveh at all. Although the 
prophets set out only to revive the ancient faith, 
actually they did not revive it so much as totally reform 
it. “hey reformed Yahvism from end to end, so that 
when they were done it was no longer Yahvism at all— 
it was Judaism! ‘They transformed a jealous demon 
who roared and belched fire from the crater of a vol- 
cano, into a transcendant spirit of Love. They took 
a bloody and remorseless protector of a desert people, 
and without realizing it, changed him into the merci- 
ful Father of all mankind. In fine, they destroyed Yah- 
veh and created God! | 

Read intelligently—that is, critically—the Bible 
makes that course of evolution strikingly clear. The 
Hebrews settled in Canaan in about the twelfth century 
B.C. By the eighth century the simple nomadic re- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 


Dat 


ligion they had brought with them had been almost 


entirely superseded by an agricultural cult. 


Especially 


was this true in the northern kingdom, Israel, where 
“civilization’’ was further advanced. ‘There morality 
had been completely ritualized by the priests, and it 
had come to be firmly believed that animal sacrifices to 


the deity could atone for 
the most heinous crimes 
against man. What had 
happened in Egypt, 
Babylonia, India, and al- 
most everywhere else, 
had happened also in 
Israel; the deep-seated 
tendency of human na- 
ture to rely on religious 
rites as the source of 
safety and security had 
led once more to the tri- 
umph of the priest. 
Corruption was regnant, 
and tyranny seemed to 
be right beyond chal- 
lenge. 

And in a land where 
such a religion went un- 
questioned,. there sud- 


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THE DIVIDED KINGDOM 


denly appeared a strange man named Amos. He was an 
unknown sheep-herder from the hills in the south, and 
at one autumn festival he arose in a temple where the 
nobles and priests of Israel were revelling in sacred 


license, and cried: 








238 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, 
and oppress the poor of the earth. . . . The 
Lord Yahveh hath sworn by his holiness: 
‘Behold, days are coming upon you when 
you shall be dragged away with hooks, even 
the last of you with fish-hooks!’ 3 


He cried out much more in that same strain. He 
whipped the drunken worshippers with his scorn, and 
terrified them out of their sordid smugness with his 
prophecies of an inevitable doom. What they did to 
him for his daring, no one knows. Perhaps they put 
him to death; or perhaps they let him preach on, think- 
ing him but a noisy dervish. For so soon as the passion 
that went into their utterance was spent, those words 
must have seemed to the Israelites no more than the 
ravings of sheer lunacy. No one until then had ever 
dared to declare that Yahveh himself might punish his 
own folk. ‘The belief was rooted that, so long as 
Yahveh was fed with enough sacrifices, there was no 
possible chance of his failing to protect his people. He 
would fight their battles for them, water their lands, 
fecundate their cattle, and prosper their deals. The 
novel idea that the god was revolted by such things as 
social crimes, by the perverting of justice or the exploit- 
ing of the poor, or by wine-bibbing or harlot-chasing 
must have been totally incomprehensible to the gentle 
folk of Israel twenty-eight hundred years ago! 

Yet that was just the idea that Amos, a simple peasant 
from the hills of Judah, dared to cry out in the temple 
at Beth-El. He declared it was all wrong to believe that 
Yahveh was a mere tribal possession, a monoply of 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL Zog 


Israel. If Yahveh had brought the Hebrews up out of 
Egypt, behold he had also brought the Philistines from 
Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir. Indeed, the 
Hebrews, Amos declared, had no more chance of curry- 
ing undue favor with Yahveh than the black-skinned 
Ethiopians! . . . So all hope for special indulgence 
was vain. Yahveh was remorselessly a god of Justice, 
and if Israel continued to rely on ritual rather than 
righteousness, then he would destroy the nation root 
andsbranch for its:sin!..,2°% 

And thus was attained the first rung in the ladder 
which brought Yahveh up to the Throne of God. 
Yahveh was now no more a mere glutton for sacrifices; 
he was the inflexible Commander of Justice. . 

The ascension of the second rung must be credited 
to another prophet, Hosea. He appeared shortly after 
Amos, and in that same northern kingdom. He, too, 
was well acquainted with the wickedness that prevailed 
in Israel, and he, too, was convinced of the impending 
doom. But he, unlike Amos, saw a chance, a belated 
yet nevertheless certain chance, for Israel to be saved. 
For Yahveh, who to Amos had been wholly an inexor- 
able Commander of Justice, was to Hosea also a Father 
of Love. Yahveh was merciful as well as just, and knew 
how to forgive. ‘Therefore, said Hosea, if only Israel 
would repent, of a surety Yahveh would spare the 
Lancopeiys., 

But Israel did not repent, and within a generation 
the kingdom met its end. The doom came, and the ten 
tribes of the North were hounded out of the land of 
their fathers into the oblivion of endless exile. After 
722 B. C. only Judah was left, and the rest of the ascent 








240 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


of Yahveh to the altitude of God over all the earth was 
achieved in and around the city of Jerusalem. Quick 
and dramatic became that ascent, as prophet swiftly 
followed prophet. First Isaiah appeared, and through 
his preaching the majesty and omnipotence of Yahveh 
became established. ‘The natural tendency of the priests 
to make their rites superior to the gods was by him 
effectively frustrated in Judah. In India, Babylonia, 
Egypt, and wherever else the power of the priests was 
allowed to grow unchecked, the gods were almost unfail- 
ingly debased and made as slaves. But in Judah that 
evil was averted through the labor of prophets like 
Isaiah. They made it glaringly plain to the people that 
not all the sacrifices on earth, nor all the magic spells, 
could exercise the slightest coercive power over Yahveh. 
As Micah, another prophet, put it tersely: 


What doth Yahveh require of thee? 
Save to do justice, to love mercy, 
And to walk humbly with thy God.? 


But the process did not end even there. “There was 
yet to come a prophet greater than all who had gone be- 
fore him. In the most trying years of Judah’s history, 
when the little land was making its last mad and futile 
stand against Babylonia, there came that mighty prophet 
named Jeremiah. And he dared to exhort his people 
to put down their arms and submit. Vain was it for 
them to resist, he declared, for Yahveh was not on their 





1 That oft-quoted verse from Micah is profoundly significant. It 
epitomizes the contributions of Amos, the prophet of justice, and Hosea, 
the prophet of mercy, and Isaiah, the prophet of heavenly majesty. In 
a score of simple words it tells the whole story of the exaltation of 
Yahveh and the moralizing of Yahvism. : 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 241 


side. On the contrary, He was on the side of the enemy, 
and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia was but His instru- 
ment. For Yahveh was not the mere godling of the 
Hebrews; He was God of all the earth! He could do 
as He willed not merely with one nation, but with all. 
Indeed, He was the Founder of all nations, the Creator 
of all the earth! . . . Amos had not been able to get 
nearly so far as that; neither had Hosea nor even Isaiah. 
Only with Jeremiah was 
the claim clearly made 
that there were no other 
gods save God. ‘There 
was no Asshur for the 
Assyrians, Dagon for the 
Philistines, Bel for the 
Babylonians, or Osiris 
for the Egyptians; there 


Hay , J re A Vif elu My 
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fortunes inextricably ppd 


bound up with the for- 
tunes of their own na- 
tions. ‘There was only JEREMIAH 
—God! 

And thus at last, toward the end of the seventh cen- 
tury B.C., Israel’s religion became truly a monotheism. 
Thus at last Yahveh really became God! ... 


7 
BUT side by side with this exaltation of Yahveh came 
also the self-exaltation of Israel. It was inevitable. 
Having declared their Yahveh to be the Supreme Ruler 
in heaven, it was logically necessary for the Israelites to 








242 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





declare themselves to be the chief nation on earth. And 
they did just that. Despite recurrent defeat and hu- 
miliation and exile, the Jews persisted in thinking them- 
selves the Chosen of God. Of course, the prophets, 
every one of them, encouraged that thought. Even 
though they denounced their fellow Hebrews and heaped 
scorn on them for imagining they could curry favor 
with Yahveh, those prophets themselves never ceased 
to declare that the Hebrews were still the Chosen of 
Yahveh. Only they insisted that the Hebrews were 
chosen not for special indulgence but solely for the task 
of bringing the knowledge of this Yahveh to all the 
world. ‘They promised that if the people would but ac- 
complish that task, then lo, they would indeed be the 
first nation on earth! Their truth would conquer all 
mankind, and the whole earth would be a Paradise in 
which their own Messiah, their ‘Anointed One,’”’ would 
reign: ase wn rincerOl, beacause tk 

It proved an astoundingly potent force, that promise. 
It became the very heart of Israel’s religion, giving it 
color and warmth and life. It accomplished the one 
fundamental purpose at the root of every great religion, 
for it offered its followers a reason for remaining alive. 
The Jews believed in that Messianic promise implicitly 
and unhesitatingly; and believing in it, they were saved 
by it. In the dread days of exile, when they sat by 
the waters of Babylon and wept, that promise was the 
one thing that kept them alive. For its sake they braced 
up and preserved themselves as a people, cherishing the 
memories of their past, and incessantly planning for 
their future. All during those slow bitter days in Baby- 
lon their leaders seem to have busied themselves with 


i 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 245 


§ 





BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON 


preparations for the great triumph to come. They made 

collections of the legends recounting the exploits of their 

ancient patriarchs and prophets and kings, writing 

been handed down by word of mouth for twenty gen- 

erations or more. They also Satie cider all their 

old laws, and elaborated praca 
ey 

fit new needs. Modern ENES Pole 5\! 

scholars are convinced ial : RAR . 

that much of the mate- § 

of Moses’ was written, 

and all of it was first 

edited, not before, but 

after, the Babylonian 

Exile. No doubt that is 

why we find in the Pen- 

and taboos and priestly 

laws that strikingly re- 

semble those of the 

have been impossible for 

the Jews to resist the in- 

fluence of their environment. Seeing priestliness ram- 

naturally breathed a measure of it into the books they 

were preparing for their own soon-to-be-prosperous 

Zion. 


down on scrolls the countless glowing tales that had 
them so that they might a 
, a] a 
rial in the “Five Books adits ae tea 
during and immediately 
tateuch so many myths 
Babylonians. It must 
pant on every side in prosperous Babylonia, the exiles 
But this law-code, despite its dominantly priestly 


er THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


character, depended for its conception and birth on the 
prophetic urge. (That was why, for all its similarity, 
it yet managed to differ so fundamentally from the 
Babylonian code from which it had been derived.) 
This Jewish law-code was prepared solely in anticipa-_ 
tion of the day when the old Messianic promise would 
be fulfilled. No one seemed to know just when that 
day would come; but all expected it in the near, the 
very near, future. And the greatest prophet of the 
exile, that unnamed genius whom we call Deutero (the 
Second) Isaiah, pictured the glory of that day in words 
that the Jews never forgot. He brought the self-exalta- 
tion of Israel to its climax, investing the future of the 
people with a dignity and a significance such as no earlier 
prophet had dreamed of. According to this unnamed 
prophet, the whole people of Israel was the Messiah, 
the “‘Anointed One.’’ All Israel was the ‘Suffering 
Servant of the Lord,’ the “‘light unto the Gentiles, that 
the Lord’s salvation may be unto the end of the 
earth.” “uate 

In this character Israel was destined to be utterly 
triumphant, promised the prophet. What other na- 
tions without number had tried and failed to accomplish 
with the sword, Israel would succeed in doing merely 
with the Word of God. And thus the Jews would ulti- 
mately be victorious over all the earth: their spirit, their 
ideals, their God, would reign supreme. Jerusalem in 
that perfect day would be the center of the world, and 
its Temple would become a house of prayer for all na- 
tions. They, the despised Jews, now scattered and 
broken and regarded with contempt—they in the end 
would be the mightiest conquerors of all! ... 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 245 


Such was the gospel of that unnamed Jew whose 
words are recorded in Chapters 40 to 55 of the Book 
of Isaiah. By contrast that gospel appears almost in- 
credibly high and hopeful. In that same century, six 
thousand miles away in China, Confucius was plodding 
from village to village in futile search for a prince who 
would bring back the past. All that was glorious seemed 
to him to have already been, and all that was right 
seemed to belong only to yesterday. . .. In India, 
almost three thousand miles away, Mahavira the Jina, 
and Gautama the Buddha, were groping in jungle 
fastnesses, seeking not a prince to bring back the past, 
but a principle of circumvention that might aid them 
to elude the future. All the past seemed to them to have 
been as bad as the present, and the future looked to 
be no whit better than the past. [he whole cycle of 
life seemed one long-drawn-out weariness to the flesh, 
an abomination to be destroyed at any price. . . . But 
there in Babylonia stood this homeless Jew, he who 
had every right to mourn for the past and tremble for 
the future, he who should have been the most dejected 
and despondent of souls—there he stood, happy, ex- 
ultant! “There was no trace of despair in his soul. On 
the contrary, he was full of hope, of mad, ecstatic hope 
for the Great Release to come. Not release from life, 
but for life; release for life nobler, richer, more abun- 
dant than it had ever been before. ‘“‘Comfort ye, com- 
fort ye, my people!” he cried. ‘“‘Fear not, thou worm 
Jacob. I shall help thee, saith the Lord. Behold, thou 
shalt yet thresh the mountains, and beat them small; 
yea, thou shalt make the very hills as chaff!’’ 

So cried this Unknown Prophet of the Exile. ... 





246 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


8 


AND then, almost immediately, came the release— 
or at least its beginning. In 538 B.C. Cyrus of Persia 
conquered Babylonia and set the exiles free. The Jews 
were free then to conquer the world—with the word of 
the Lord. 

But the glorious conquest began most ingloriously. 
When the Jews returned to their own little land, they 
took back with them the law-code which their scribes 
had prepared for them in exile. And, as we have already 
said, it was in effect a priestly code. From then on, 
therefore, the voice of the prophets grew fainter and 
fainter, and the chanting of the priests grew ever more 
strident. What happened in India, China, Persia, and 
every other “‘civilized’’ land, happened also in Judea. 
Instead of seeking to win God’s favor and save them- 
selves by doing justice and loving mercy, the Jews tried 
to accomplish those ends by offering sacrifices and mum- 
bling prayers. (It was much less difficult a technique 
to try.) And thus the priests were brought into power. 
The priests were the chief sponsors for the easier tech- 
nique, and therefore they were vastly enriched by its 
popularity. The more the people sought to bribe their 
way to God by means of priestly ritual, the more the 
priests rose in might. “There was no escaping that sorry 
development, for the masses were not yet ready to follow 
the high commands of the prophets. They were ready 
only for the little laws of the priests, for the petty rules 
made by those men of petty spirit who imagined they 
could organize morality. 

It is quite possible that in the beginning those priests 








WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL Dy, 





were most sincere in their labors. Perhaps they believed 
they were being utterly true to the prophets when they 
sought to organize prophetic truth. But in a little while 
they became so involved in the process of organiza- 
tion that they began to lose all sight of the truth. The 
means became more important than the end; the how 
overwhelmed the why. ‘The labor of the prophets, 
that fury of preaching that had somehow dragged the 
cult of a marauding desert-folk up hill until it became 
the superlative ethical faith of the ancient world, was 
now bit by bit undone. For almost six hundred years 
after the return from Babylonia, the priests let the re- 
ligion of Israel degenerate into an ever more ritualized 
morality. Indeed, if during those six hundred years 
the religion did not degenerate entirely, it could have 
been only because prophetic protest, though intermit- 
tently choked, was still never quite strangled. Ever and 
again isolated prophets arose to decry the sacerdotalism 
and corruption of the priests and people. Some of them 
were beheaded, like John the Baptist; and some were 
crucified, like Jesus of Nazareth. But they came never- 
theless, an unbroken succession of heroic and godly 
protestants. It was the old promise of the Messiah 
that spurred them on. Despite all the agonies and hu- 
miliations they endured in those years, despite all the 
outrages visited by Persian, Greek, Syrian, and Roman 
overlords, some Jews still believed that they must be 
triumphant in the end. Always a remnant of the tiny 
folk looked forward to the immediate coming of the 
“Anointed One,” to the speedy coming of the Kingdom 
of God. Indeed, the more dreadful and crushing their 
plight, the more frenziedly this saving remnant looked 





248 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


forward to that advent. “Throughout the land there 
went strange men as its spokesmen, crying to the people: 
“Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” 

But though it seemed ever at hand, it never came. 
Darker and darker grew the world of the Jews as the 
vast black wings of Rome closed down over it. Israel 
writhed in the bloody talons of the Empire for more 
than acentury. And then, goaded almost into insanity, 
Israel rebelled. “Tired of waiting for the Messiah, the 
Jews tried to force the day of His coming. The whole 
country flared up in rebellion, and Israel made its cli- 
macteric effort to preserve itself as a nation. “Two of 
Rome’s greatest generals were sent down to quell the 
uprising, and for four years every wady in the land ran 
red with the blood of the slain. For many months the 
holy city of Jerusalem was besieged; and when finally 
in the summer of 70 A. D. it was captured and destroyed, 
the Jewish nation was destroyed too. The dread 
Diaspora, the ‘Scattering,’ began in earnest then. The 
Jews either fled or were hounded to the uttermost ends 
of the earth, and the glory which was Zion was ended, 
it seemed, forever. 

But it was not ended. Not at all. On the contrary, 
it but began then anew. ‘Though the Temple was de- 
stroyed, and the whole sacrificial cult had become a 
thing of the past, Israel still continued to live. For the 
one great promise of the prophets was still effective, even 
though the little laws of the priests were now null and 
void. Even after the Dispersion the Jews continued to 
cherish their dream of the Messiah. It may have been 
an irrational dream, ridiculous, altogether mad—but it 
persisted. And so long as it persisted, the Jews per- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL oo 


sisted. Even to this day it persists. It has been de- 
nounced and betrayed, attacked and violated—but it 
has never been quite forgotten. 


9 


THIS is not the place for a detailed account of the 
history of the Jews during the last nineteen centuries. 
One wishes it were, for that history is like none other 
in all the saga of religion. ‘The story of the Parsees, 
those exiled descendants of the ancient Zoroastrians, 
comes perhaps closest to it; for that people, too, persisted 
because it cherished a hope. But save for the little group 
of Persians still awaiting the triumph of Ormuzd, none 
other is to be likened to the Jews. “The Jews stand 
out among the races of the world, a strange, an inex- 
plicable folk, with a history far stranger than fiction. 

But at least a hint as to that history must be given 
here. When the Temple was destroyed and the old 
priestly cult was ended, the whole technique of the re- 
ligion had to be radically altered. “The priestly organi- 
zation was no more, and a new organization had to be 
created. So the rabbinical cult resulted. A gigantic 
legal literature called the Talmud was developed in the 
first five centuries after the Destruction, and later an 
even more gigantic literature of Talmudic commentaries 
and super-commentaries. It is not difficult to explain 
why the development took such a form. The prophets 
had for all time answered the why of life for the Jew. 
They had said that for a while he must live and suffer 
so that ultimately he might triumph, so that ultimately 
he might bring on the Kingdom of God. But those 
prophets had been far from explicit as to the more im- 





250 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


mediate matter of the how. Granted there was a pur- 
pose in life, yet how could the Jew keep alive long 
enough to realize it? He saw himself to be quite help- 
less in that whirlpool of races and creeds which is the 
world. He had no home, no might, no prestige— 
nothing save an ineluctable belief in his own importance 
to mankind. And that by itself was far from enough 
to keep him afloat in the whirlpool. So he began to 
tremble for his very existence. Fear took hold of him 
almost as acutely as once it had taken hold of his savage 
ancestor in the wilderness. But whereas fear drove the 
savage to have recourse to fetishes, it impelled this 
remote descendant to take to laws. The savage had 
tried to save himself from drowning in fear by conjur- 
ing up reeds of magic to which he could cling. For 
exactly the same reason the Jew built up a dyke of law 
behind which he could hide. 


It was that Wall of Law that saved the Jew from 
destruction after his own home was destroyed. It kept 
him apart from the Gentiles, regulating his prayer, his 
food, his very raiment, so that he could never for a mo- 
ment forget his identity. “The dream of the prophets 
made life reasonable for the Jew, but only the law- 
code of the rabbis made it possible. And so long as the 
Gentile world kept fear palpitating in the heart of the 
Jew, so long that wall stood firm and unbroken. If it 
is crumbling visibly in our day, it is largely because the 
world is growing less intolerant, and the fear in the 
heart of the Jew is being dispelled. If the old Orthodox 
Judaism is disintegrating in our day, and ‘‘Reform”’ or 
“Liberal’’ Judaism is growing, it is because the wind of 
emancipation is sweeping the soul of Israel free of dread. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL Zon 





But there is no certain assurance that that process is 
going on with any rapidity. Of the sixteen or seven- 
teen million Jews in the world today it is doubtful 
whether even two million of them are unhindered by 
orthodox taboos and scruples. Intense fear of the goy, 
the Gentile, still lingers in the soul of the Jew, be he a 
dweller in Washington or in Warsaw. A terror pounded 
into him incessantly for twenty or thirty centuries can 
hardly be dispelled in a generation. No, fear is still 
tormenting the Jew, and as fast as the Law is crumbling, 
he is building a new wall—or rebuilding an old one—of 
nationalism. In spirit, if not often in body, he is now 
returning to old Palestine. At least, his young men 
and maidens are returning there, to tread once more the 
soil of Amos and Jeremiah. And thus through a re- 
created nationalism is the contemporary Jew seeking to 
save himself from extinction. 

So it is on the now familiar motif of fear that we 
must close this book, too. The Jew clings to his ritual 
law largely because he senses subconsiously that other- 
wise he will lose his identity among the non-Jews. Jn 
other words, he is God-fearing largely because he is Goy- 
fearing. But it should be noticed that this fear at the 
heart of Judaism is generically different from the kind 
that nourishes most other religions. It is fear not for 
the destinies of the individual, but of the group. Until 
the Jews were brought into contact with the Zoroas- 
trians, they seem to have had no notion of individual 
immortality. Until then, the hunger of the Jews seems 
to have been only for national immortality. And even 
though the idea of a personal after-life has since struck 
deep root in Judaism, the earlier idea still remains the 


Zo2 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


more important. The Jews still seem far more con- 
cerned about their future as a group than as individuals. 
No doubt that is why they have been so willing all these 
centuries to suffer persecution and death rather than 
forswear their faith. ‘Their religion has taught them 
that as individuals they do not count; that only as 
members of the Jewish group do they possess any dig- 
nity or significance. And accepting that teaching im- 
plicitly, the Jews have managed to survive twenty cen- 
turies of the bitterest oppression ever visited on any folk 
on earth. Not merely have they survived; in a measure 
they have even flourished. ‘hey have so grown in num- 
bers and advanced in power that they are to be found 
in conspicuous positions almost everywhere in the world. 
And wherever they dwell they are as a leaven in society, 
stimulating an incessant ferment of prophetic protest 
and rebelliousness. Oppression, far from weakening 
them, has only tempered their spirit. Like a sword the 
Jew has been stretched out on the anvil of history and 
with every blow has grown only more resilient and 
durable. 

And it is the Jew’s religion, his certainty of an ulti- 
mate deliverance from the Gentiles, his faith in a Mes- 
sianic future for his people, that has made the miracle of 
his survival possible. “Che Jew seems almost organically 
incapable of forgetting that high-born promise made to 
him by his prophets twenty-five centuries ago. He still 
believes, albeit unconsciously, that it is his duty to keep 
alive because he has a mission to fulfil. His Bible, his 
daily prayers, even his folk-songs and fairy-tales, all 
beat into his soul one obsessive belief: that he is pre- 
eminently the sword of the spirit that shall yet clear 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL 253 


the way for the coming of the Kingdom of God! ‘That 
may very well be a foolish, an irrational, a presumptu- 
ous belief—but so is every other in all this believing 
world of ours. All religions are built on one utterly 
undemonstrable and apparently irrational dogma: that 
somehow and somewhere some human beings may yet 
be able to cope with the universe. Therefore Judaism 
cannot be said to be more presumptuous than any other 
religion in its basic conviction. It can only be said that 
the Jews seem more closely bound and more firmly sus- 
tained by their conviction than the adherents of most 
other religions. But that, far from revealing a defect in 
the Jew’s religion, proclaims what is probably its chiefest 
virtue: Judaism works. ... 








s 





book seven: ff 
what happened 
Ww. —— 


A) 
i qi 4 





BCOK SEVEN 
WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 


I. JESUS 


1: Palestine in the first century—the Zealots and saints. 2: 
The childhood of Jesus—youth. 3: John the Baptist—Jesus 
begins to preach. 4: His heresies—his tone of authority—did 
Jesus think himself the Messiah? 5: Jesus goes to Jerusalem— 
falls out of favor—is arrested, tried, and crucified. 6: The 
*‘resurrection’’—the disciples begin to preach. 7: The religion 
of the Nazarenes—the growing saga about Jesus. 


II. CHRIST 


1: The mysteries in the Roman Empire—the philosophies. 2: 
The story of Saul of Tarsus. 3: The work of Paul. 4: Jesus 
becomes the Christ—the compromises with paganism—the 
superiority of Christianity—the writing of the Gospels—per- 
secution by Rome. 5: Constantine and the triumph of 
Christianity. 6: The cost of success—the schisms. 7: The 
spread of Christianity—the ethical element in Christianity— 
how it sobered Europe. 8: The development of the Church— 
Protestantism——why Christianity has succeeded, 


296 


BOOK SEVEN 
WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 
I. JESUS 


ma ORE was the travail in Israel be- 
™ cause of the oppression of the 
Romans. Armies thundered up 
and down the _ countryside, 
ploughing a bloody furrow 
wherever they went; and spies 
mmm stunk about in the alley-ways 
of the towns, carrying slander 
and dealing death as they moved. 
Rome, the mighty power that 
could conquer whole continents, 
could not possibly keep tiny Palestine in check. Rome 
could not fathom the Jews, could not understand their 
maddening obstinacy and rebelliousness. She could not 
understand why the Jews went mad at the thought of 
worshipping the images of emperors, or why they deaf- 
ened the world with lamentations when their Temple 
money was used for building aqueducts. And naturally, 
therefore, Rome lost all patience. At the least remon- 
strance she hacked at the Jews mercilessly, not reckoning 
what whirlwind might rise from the enforced order she 
sowed) ?.. + 

And the Jews, racked with pain beyond bearing, 
weak from loss of blood, went almost mad. They had 
257 





258 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


come to an impasse in which they knew not what to 
do. They dared not surrender, for they still cherished 
their ancient Messianic hope. Despite all the terror 
that had been their lot almost from the day of their 
creation, the Jews still believed that their Anointed 
One, their Messiah, would come, and that with Him 
would be ushered in the Kingdom of God on earth. On 
this score there seems to have been no division among 
the Jews. Only as to the means of bringing on the 
Great Day, was there any division. As to that, some 
of the Jews counseled war, and others counseled 
prayer. They who were strong of body and fiery of 
temper could look forward to no salvation save one 
wrested by the sword. ‘These were called Zealots, and 
they went up and down the land attacking lone Roman 
garrisons, murdering Roman sympathizers, plotting, 
protesting, fighting, dying, all to bring on by brute 
force the Reign of Peace. . . . And what they brought 
on in the end was only a bloody debacle, a final con- 
flict that simply wiped out the Jewish nation and 
scattered its hapless survivors to the four corners of the 
Saree et. 

But those who were strong of soul rather than body 
sought to win salvation by quite other means. To them 
it seemed that the Reign of Peace would be brought on 
only by ways of peace, and they therefore cried to the 
people to rebel against their own doings rather than 
the doings of Rome. ‘They begged the people to purge 
their own souls of sin, to crush their own lust for power 
and vengeance, to be humble and meek of spirit, to be 
loving and forgiving, to return good for evil, and thus 
quietly, prayerfully, to await the wondrous day of 


WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE dae, 


reward to come. . . . And in the end those preachers 
of peace somehow helped give rise to a new religion, 
a great faith which, though it never brought release to 
Israel, did bring salvation to half the rest of the 
MOTI lire, 


2 


THE prologue of the story of that new religion opens 
in Galilee. Almost two thousand years ago there was 
born in the Galilean village of Nazareth, a Jewish child 
to whom was given the name of Joshua, or Jesus. We 
do not know for certain how the early years of this 
child were spent. “The Gospels recount many legends 
concerning his conception, birth, and youth, but they 
are no more to be relied on than the suspiciously similar 
legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster. In 
his youth Jesus seems to have followed the calling of 
his father, and was a carpenter. His schooling had 
probably been slight, for his people were humble 
villagers, and in all Galilee there was notoriously little 
learning in those days. He cherished many of the 
primitive notions of the simple folk to whom he be- 
longed, believing that disease and sometimes even death 
were caused by the presence of foul demons, and could 
be removed by prayer. He knew little if any Greek, 
and could never have even heard of Greek science or 
philosophy. All he knew was the Bible, and probably 
the text of that had been taught him only by rote. Like 
every other Jewish lad, he had been made to memorize 
the ancient prophecies in the Bible, and to keep the 
Biblical and Rabbinical laws of his time. Above all he 
must have been taught to prize as dearer than life the 


260 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


old obsession of his people that some day they would 
be miraculously freed by the Messiah. Indeed, so well 
was that last drilled into him that, as he matured, the 
hunger for the realization of the hope became his all- 
consuming passion. It seems to have given him no rest 
in that sheltered little village where he plied his craft. 
He could not sit by and 
patiently wait. He had 
to take staff in hand, and 
go out and do what he 
could to hasten the com- 
ing of the Great Day! 
‘There was nothing 
extraordinary in such 
conduct. As we have 
already seen, Palestine 
then swarmed with 
young Jews bent on a 
similar mission. Most 
of them, of course, 
joined the Zealots, and 
went around fomenting 
war against Rome. 
Z ‘There were others, how- 
THE MAN FROM GALILER ¢Vet, who counselled 


only peace with God, 
and it was to them that the simple Galilean carpenter 


joined himself. It must have been a queer company that 
he fell into. Most of those preachers of peace were burn- 
ing evangelists who, in imitation of the ancient prophets, 
had clad themselves in camel hair and leather girdles. 
Some were obviously mad: wild-eyed, tousle-haired, 


ay 


} 
| 


Oy 
owt 


ont 


PEK: Bi 





ees (OM 
FRM 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 261 


frothy-lipped epileptics who rushed about screaming 
meaningless chatter in the ears of all who would listen. 
Others, however, were just as obviously of that type 
which throughout history has given us our prophets and 
geniuses: that madly sane type whose members so often 
are stoned while alive and enthroned when dead... . 
But insane and sane alike, they were all in a white heat 
to get the people prepared for the swift coming of the 
Messiah. Up and down the land they went, crying: 
“Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”’ 
And they stood on the banks of the Jordan and im- 
mersed the repentant in its holy waters. It was terribly 
important, according to these evangelists, that one 
should be thus baptized in the Jordan, for thus alone 
could one be proved worthy of inheriting the Kingdom 
of God on earth. ‘They declared that all who were 
caught unbaptized—that is, uncleansed of evil spirits— 
when the Messiah came, could never, never know the 
joys of the Millennium. .. . 


3 


NOW at this time there was in the land an evangelist 
so successful in drawing the people to the Jordan that 
he had come to be called John the Baptizer. He was 
a rough, ascetic person who lived on locusts and wild 
honey, and who clothed himself in animal skins: a 
veritable re-creation of the ancient prophet Elijah. To 
him it seemed that yet another day, another hour, and 
behold, the Kingdom of Heaven would be here! . . 

It was to this John the Baptizer that Jesus came when 
he left his home in Nazareth. For a time he was a 
follower of John, one of a multitude of young Jews 





262 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


and Jewesses who believed in the mission of the wild 
prophet and tried to aid him in his work of saving souls. 
But when a little while thereafter John was imprisoned 
for his denunciation of the reigning tetrarch, Herod 
Antipas, Jesus went back to Galilee and began to preach 
by himself. His gospel was much like that of his 
teacher. ‘“The time is fulfilled,’ he cried, “‘and the 
Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye!’’ So did he 
cry wherever he could find ears to hearken. He went to 
the beach of the Sea of Galilee, where the fishermen could 
be found at their labor; he went into the synagogues in 
the villages, where the pious and the proper folk could 
be found at their worship; he even went into the houses 
of shame, where he could reach the publicans and sin- 
ners. And wherever he went, few could resist his 
eloquence. There must have been some quality in his 
bearing, something in the intensity of his spirit and 
the earnestness of his preaching, that simply compelled 
the harried Galileans to give ear. And giving ear, drink- 
ing in the words of comfort which he uttered, they could 
not help but believe. And believing, accepting whole- 
heartedly the promise which he made, they could not 
help but feel saved. 

When the stories of that young preacher's wander- 
ings were gathered together in later years and set down 
in writing, it was said that he performed all manner of 
miracles as he went about the land. Perhaps there is a 
fragment of truth in that tradition, for if people will 
only believe with sufficient faith, miracles become not at 
all impossible. “The blind—if their eyes have not been 
taken right out—will be able to see, and the halt—if 
their limbs have not been torn away—will be able to 


WiA HAPPENED AIN  RUROPE 263 


walk. The working of such wonders has been ascribed 
to almost every great prophet and saint in history, and 
even allowing for the inevitable exaggeration brought 
on by enthusiasm and time, there is still left a core of 
truth that cannot be discounted. Implicit faith, which 
on ten thousand and one occasions has made even a 
medicine-man’s dance effective as a medium of cure, 
could not but make effective a prophet’s hand... . 

And Jesus could quite command implicit faith. He 
himself believed; with all his heart and soul he believed 
that soon would come the Great Release. So the poor 
Jews and Jewesses of Galilee, the simple fishermen and 
farmers wives, the blear-eyed publicans and low women 
of shame, were compelled to believe with him. “They 
could not possibly resist. For this young man brought 
them in their distress their only ray of hope. Without 
that promise which he held out, their life was left one 
hellish gloom. ‘There they were, starved, sweated, dis- 
eased, and full of fear. Wretched peasants and slum- 
dwellers that they were, they had nothing whatsoever 
to live for, nothing—save that promise which Jesus 
proclaimed. 

So they hearkened and believed and were saved. By 
the score, by the hundred, they flocked to hear him, 
plodding many a weary mile through the dust of the 
hilly roads to stand at last before him and hear his 
words. He spoke without the slightest flourish, using 
plain words and homely parables. He indulged in no 
philosophy or theology, for, after all, he was an un- 
tutored toiler who knew nothing of such vanities. Nor, 
seemingly, did he preach any inordinate heresies. Un- 
like Buddha, to whom he is often compared, he did not 





264 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


preach a radically new gospel. ‘“Think not that I am 
come to destroy the law or the prophets,’’ he declared. 
“I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.” His prayers 
were made up of verses which the Pharisee rabbis were 
wont to recite in the synagogues, and which are to be 
found even today in the orthodox Jewish book of 
prayer. His garb, even to the wearing of the fringed 
hem, was the garb of an observant Jew. He actually 
went out of his way to pay the Temple tax to the 
priests, and saw no absolute wrong in offering sacrifices. 
No, he was not a heretic in the sense that Ikhnaton or 
Zoroaster or Buddha were heretics. Outwardly he was 
distinctly a conforming Jew. 


4 


YET for all his conformity in these and other re- — 
spects, Jesus was definitely a rebel. Like most of the 
great prophets who had preceded him in Israel, he 
scorned the rich and the proud, the priests in the Temple 
and the rabbis in the synagogues. His heart went out 
only to the downtrodden, to those sorry wretches who 
could win their way to God neither with costly sacri- 
fices nor erudite learning. His whole gospel was in- 
tended but to comfort the disinherited, for it declared 
that no matter how unlettered they might be they could 
nevertheless be taken into the Kingdom of God when 
it came. For it was repentance alone, according to Jesus, 
that could make one eligible for entrance into that King- 
dom. Indeed, wealth and pedantic learning, he declared, 
were hindrances; only purity of heart was of any worth. 

Now such a gospel was literally saturated with heresy. 
Because it denounced the rich and commanded them to 


WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 265 


divest themselves of all their possessions, it attacked the 
whole sacrificial cult. For that cult, with its priests and 
levites, its elaborate Temple and costly parade, depended 
entirely upon wealth for its existence. A people with- 
out possessions could never possibly afford fat bullocks 
to burn or skins of oil to pour away. Besides, if purity 
of heart was the sole credential of any avail, what sense 
was there in offering any sacrifices? . . . Moreover, 
because this gospel minimized the importance of learn- 
ing, and commanded men to keep merely the spirit of 
the law, it attacked the whole Rabbinical cult. For that 
cult, created by the Scribes and Pharisees, depended on 
scholarly knowledge of the letter of the law for its 
importance. The “Wall of Law’ of the rabbis had 
been built out of the involved interpretations and re- 
interpretations of every word in the Pentateuch; indeed, 
of every letter and of every illumination around each 
letter in it. And it seemed to many of the rabbis that 
only one who knew that Pentateuch word for word, 
and all the innumerable interpretations thereof, could 
possibly be a righteous soul. Many of those rabbis 
despised the “‘man of the earth,”’ the peasant, saying 
that his ignorance of the minutiz of the law was a mill- 
stone that dragged him down to the level of the heathen. 
Obviously, therefore, this gospel of Jesus declaring that 
the “‘man of the earth’ could be the very salt of the 
earth, was charged with quite devastating heresy. 

But the heresies of Jesus were not at all without prece- 
dent in Israel. Innumerable prophets had arisen before 
his time to attack the greedy priests; and the very rabbis 
themselves reviled in their Talmud the hypocritical and 
bigoted in their midst, calling them ‘‘the Pharisaic 


266 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


plague.’”” What really marked Jesus as one unlike any 
preacher that had come before him was not so much 
what he said, as the authority on which he said it. His 
tone was altogether novel in Jewish experience. Every’ 
other prophet had uttered his heresies in the name of 
God. ‘Thus saith the Lord,’’ had preceded their every 
declaration. But this carpenter from Nazareth, for all 
his meekness and humility, spoke only in his own name. 
“Take my yoke upon ye,” he said. . . . ‘““Whosoever 
shall lose his life for my sake,’”’ ... “ye have heard 
that. it was said of old time... but J say unto 
you...’ So did he speak, not as the mouthpiece of 
God, but as one vested with an almost divine authority 
of his own. 

It was that tone which in the end cost Jesus his life. 
The priests and scholars must have been incensed by it 
beyond bearing. Such a tone would have sounded 
blasphemous to them even in a prince or a learned man. 
In an untutored laborer, in a peasant from benighted 
Galilee, it must have seemed the most outrageous impu- 
dence. . . . But it was that tone, after all, that en- 
dowed Jesus with his striking magnetism. It created 
and sustained the impression that he was a transcendent 
person, and bestowed on him the power to take cringing 
serfs and make them over into towering men. Only be- 
cause he believed in himself so firmly, only because he 
was so superbly confident, could he make others accept 
his words. His tone was not that of a mere prophet, but 
almost that of God Himself. And that was why men 
began to say he was more than a man, that he was the 
Messiah! It was not merely that he could perform what 
were thought to be miracles, casting out demons and 





With Aree NE ane EUROPE 267 


raising the dead—though such reputed powers must 
have furnished the most convincing proof to the ma- 
jority of his peasant followers. It was more that he 
could carry himself with the divine assurance of an 
“Anointed One,’’ casting out fear and inspiring the 
living. 

Whether Jesus himself was convinced he was the 
Messiah is a problem still unsolved. His refusal to make 
the claim in public, the almost too astute way in which 
he avoided a direct answer whenever the question was 
put to him, presents to this day a dilemma to the faith- 
ful. But it is certain that many of those who followed 
Jesus believed him to be the Messiah. ‘The sight of that 
ragged young Jew hurrying beneath the hot sun of 
Galilee, poor, unlearned, yet able to breathe a perfect 
frenzy of hope and cheer into vast throngs of forlorn 
derelicts, must have seemed proof indisputable that he 
was indeed the ‘“‘Anointed One.’’ ‘There was a won- 
drous love in his preaching and, coupled with it, an air 
of certainty, of authority. For five hundred years some 
Messiah had been awaited, and more than once it had 
been men of the basest stuff that had been mistaken for 
Him. Charlatans and madmen, arrant knaves and 
driveling fools, had time and again been hailed by the 
hysterical mob as the Awaited One. Is it any wonder, 
therefore, that an exalted person like this young car- 
penter, Jesus, should have been hailed likewise? ... 


5 


THAT Jesus was indeed an exalted person is hardly to 
be doubted. Even when one has discounted all the 





268 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


legends, all the stupid and silly and gross extravagances, 
all the pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that 
clog and confuse the Gospel accounts, one still is left 
with an extraordinary personality to explain. It must 
be remembered that Jesus was not the only preacher of 
kindness or worker of mircles that ever had been known 
among the Jews. Many such men had preceded him; 
many there were in his own day; and many more came 
after him. But none other succeeded in so impressing 
his character on his followers. It took only a little 
while for his fame to spread throughout Galilee, and 
soon great crowds came out to see and hear him wherever 
he went. He was often heckled by the elders in the 
synagogues, and more than once he was slandered and 
persecuted. But that only increased his following. We 
are told that once when he began to preach by the 
Sea of Galilee, the surging throng on the beach became 
so heavy that he had to get into a boat and speak from 
the water... 

But it was only in Galilee that he was then famous, 
and Galilee was simply a remote and unimportant sec- 
tion of the country. It is probable that in Jerusalem, 
the capital, not even a rumor of his appearance was yet 
known. So there came at last the day when Jesus de- 
termined to go out from Galilee, and carry his gospel 
to the rest of his people. He determined to go even 
as far as Jerusalem and attempt to utter his word in the 
very stronghold of the priests and rabbis. The time 
chosen was just before the Passover, for Jesus knew the 
capital would then be thronged with Jews come from 
every corner of the land to celebrate the feast in the 
Temple. So with his twelve chief followers, his dis- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 269 


ciples, and a little group of women devotees, he courage- 
ously set out southward. ... 

But then came swift tragedy. By the time Jesus 
reached the capital, his fame had already preceded him. 
A great mob rushed out to meet him, wildly throwing 
their cloaks to the ground beneath the feet of the colt on > 
which he rode. “They 
hailed him as their Mes- (7 
siah, as the long-awaited 
Son of David who 
would deliver them 
from their travail. 
“Hosanna,” they cried 
ecstatically. ‘“‘Blessed be 
he that cometh in the 
Meadnenol) the ‘Lord! 
mlosanitiaie a) hr. ss) One 
wonders whether those 
poor wretches out of the 
alleyways and dunghills 
of old Jerusalem under- 
stood who the man 
Jesus really was. (One 
wonders whether even 
his own disciples under- 
stood—or whether even 
his most pious devotees today understand.) To that 
frantic mob, at least, he was simply an arch-Zealot, a 
martial hero who had come to lead them in bloody re- 
bellion against Rome. And when, after three days of 
teaching in the Temple courts, they discovered that he 
was nothing of the sort, when they began to see that he 


Mh 
((« 
\\ 





THE PATH OF JESUS 





270 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


wanted them to make peace with God, not war against 
Rome, they deserted him as quickly as they had flocked 
to his support. Poor desperate wretches, they were in 
no mood to seek peace or return good for evil, or turn 
the other cheek. They did not want to render unto 
Caesar that which was Caesar's. “They wanted to kill. 
‘They wanted to make a holocaust of the whole Roman 
army, and to become once more a free and prideful 
Nation! ys) sen. 

And the moment the populace turned against him, 
Jesus had no chance. ‘The priests at once began plotting 
decisive measures against him, for they hated him no 
less than men of similar kidney had hated every other 
prophet in Israel. He had scorned them and attacked 
the whole basis of their cult. Besides, he had publicly 
flaunted them, storming into the Temple courts one day, 
and hurling their money-changers out into the street. 
‘They dared not let him go on. . . . And although the 
rabbis despised the priests no less than did Jesus, yet they 
could not rally to his defense. He had scorned them, 
too, flaying them for their love of the letter and neglect 
of the spirit of the Holy Law. He had dared call them 
hypocrites and whited sepulchres. And, above all, he 
had outraged them with his unwonted tone of authority. 
So they, too, were against him. 

At the last moment Jesus seems to have realized how 
reckless he had been in daring to come to Jerusalem. 
His disciples had warned him against it when they were 
still safe in Galilee; but young Jesus, in his ardor, had 
paid no attention. And now he knew himself lost. 
Belatedly he tried to escape with them, but he was 
pursued, betrayed, and taken prisoner in a wooded place 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE Dal 


outside the city walls. He was hurriedly tried by a 
Jewish court which seems to have been made up largely 
of priests. Then summarily he was adjudged guilty. 
From the haste with which the whole trial was con- 
ducted, one can judge how terrified were the priests. 
They seem not to have cared in the least what it was 
they condemned him for. They were afraid of Jesus, 
afraid not merely because his heresies endangered their 
own position, but even more because the excitement 
which he had aroused among the masses might endanger 
the peace of the whole land. Rome, the overlord, was 
wont to put down every sort of public turmoil with 
scant mercy or patience. So ina panic the elders of the 
Jews took this young preacher and turned him over to 
the Roman governor. 

And by that governor he was sentenced to die. 

There was no justice in it all. How could one ex- 
pect justice in times so tense and a land so mad? ‘The 
governor, Pontius Pilate, could have had no understand- 
ing of what that young carpenter had done or had 
dreamed of doing. ‘This Pilate probably thought him 
but another mad young Zealot, a rebel against Rome, a 
pretender to the throne of Judea. 

And the very next day the life of that young Galilean 
was snuffe out. “The Roman soldiers took him to the 
top of a hill nearby, scourged him with rods, crowned 
him in derision with a wreath of thorns, and nailed him 
to a cross. [hey nailed him to a cross between two 
thieves, and over his head they carved the mocking 
words, “King of the Jews.’” And there in mortal an- 
guish he hung for hours. Had he been stronger of body, 
perhaps life would have lingered in him for days. But 





272 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


had he been stronger in body, no doubt he would never 
have joined the school of John the Baptist and become a 
saver of souls. Instead, he would have joined the 
Zealots, fighting with the sword against Rome, and 
coming to his end not on a cross but behind some blood- 
soaked rampart. No, from the beginning his strength 
must have been not the strength of body but of soul; 
and toward the end even that strength must have ebbed 
low in him. For as he hung there on the cross of shame, 
he was alone, deserted. Gone were the huzzahing 
crowds; gone even were his own trusted disciples. Only 
a little knot of desolated women stood by to watch 
him breathe his last. In the city he was already forgot- 
ten. “The members of that mob which had so ecstatically 
received him a few days earlier were now busily prepar- 
ing for the Passover feast. And his disciples were hid- 
ing in the fields, too terrified to confess that they had 
even known the martyr. So deserted he hung there on 
that lone hill. 

The sun began to set, and the wild violet glow in 
the west crept up till it lost itself in the blue of the 
evening sky. The prophet Jesus, his poor body sagging 
from the bloody spikes that tore his hands and feet, 
could endure the pangs no longer. He began to moan. 
Brokenly he moaned as the throes of death came over 
him. ‘“‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
me?’’ he begged. 

And then he died. 


6 


BUT he died only to come to life again, to come to a 
life more enduring, more wondrously potent than had 








WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 273 


ever been vouchsafed to him in the days before his 
shameful death. Indeed, he literally came to life again 
—according to those who had most earnestly followed 
him. For ere a week had passed, a revulsion had come 
over those terrified disciples. In the dread hour of the 
trial they had fled from their Master; and now their 
mortification knew no bounds. “They trembled at the 
thought of returning home to Galilee to face the bitter 
contempt, or worse still, the deathly dejection of their 
comrades there. Even more, they trembled at the 
thought of living out the rest of their lives without their 
Jesus to believe in. That young preacher, with his 
supernal magnetism, had come to mean too much to 
them. Without their faith in him and his Messiahship, 
their own lives became empty, meaningless. Skulking 
there amid the rock-strewn hills outside Jerusalem, they 
realized as never before that they still had to believe in 
him—or die. . . . And, because believing in a corpse 
was too difficult, they began to believe that Jesus was 
still alive. “They began to say that three days after his 
burial he had miraculously arisen from the dead. They 
even declared they had actually seen him in the act of 
rising from the sepulcher, had seen him as he was taken 
up to Heaven, right up to the throne of glory. They 
began to tell how his spirit had actually walked and 
talked with them, had even broken bread with them! 
. It was not a desire to deceive that impelled those 
disciples to tell such stories. “They sincerely believed the 
stories themselves. “They were overwhelmingly con- 
vinced that Jesus had really come to life again, and was 
now in Heaven waiting to return once more. 
And with this new conviction grown strong in their 


2/4 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


hearts, the eleven disciples emerged from their hiding- 
places and began to preach again. It was not at all a 
new religion thit they began to preach, however. They 
were still Jews, and they continued to be faithful to the 
established synagogue and Temple worship. They dif- 
fered from their fellow Jews only in that they believed 
that the Messiah had already come, and that He had 
come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. They were for 
that reason called Nazarenes, and probably they formed 
but one more of many such Messianic sects already in 
existence. There were the Johannites, who believed 
John the Baptist had been the Messiah, and who per- 
sisted in the belief for yet many generations. There 
were also the Theudasians, who believed a certain mad 
preacher named Theudas was the Awaited One, and 
who clung to the belief until the Romans cut off Theu- 
das’s head. The whole land swarmed with such little 
sects, for the hunger for salvation in Israel was then as 
agonizing, and as unsatisfied by the established religion, 
as it had been, for instance, in India in the day of Buddha 
and Mahavira. 
vf 


OF the life of the first Nazarenes we know exceed- 
ingly little. It would seem that they dwelt together in 
little communist colonies, loving each other and sharing 
each other’s joys and sorrows. They ate at a common 
table and had no private property. With te noblest 
ardor they set out to live as their Master had commanded 
them. . . . And continually, unflaggingly, they sought 
new members. They went throughout the land, even 


as far as Damascus, trying to win converts to their little 
movement, 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE PES, 


But it must have been slow and discouraging labor, 
for the Messiahship of Jesus was far from easy to prove. 
Even when the shamefulness of his death could be ex- 
plained away by a miraculous resurrection, there was 
still the obscurity of his life to be justified. “The Jews 
had been taught to expect that the Anointed One would 
be no less than a scion of the royal dynasty of David, 
an heroic and magnificent prince who would destroy all 
Israel’s enemies with a mere wave of the hand, and 
would ascend a throne of gold and ivory and precious 
stones, to rule then over all the world as the Prince of 
Peace. It was just the sort of grand and gaudy dream 
one might expect of a people with a tremendous will- 
to-live cramped in a frail and tortured body. Anda 
village carpenter from half-heathen Galilee, an obscure 
evangelist who had tramped through the dust to Jeru- 
salem with a tiny following of ragged peasants and 
reformed sinners, only to be summarily snuffed out by 
Rome—such a sorry figure hardly measured up to the 
requirements set down for the hero in that dream. The 
contrast between the actual Jesus and the imagined Mes- 
siah had not been so patent when the preacher had 
still been alive. “The magnitude of his spirit and the 
fervor of his preaching had been so absorbing as to 
make men forget altogether whence he had come and 
how raggedly he was clad. “They had been swept away 
by his simple stirring eloquence, and men had then been 
quite ready to hail him as the Son of David. . . . But 
now that Jesus was no longer physically present on 
earth, all this was changed. “To those Jews who had 
not known him, who had never heard him preach or 
seen him cast demons out of the mad and the palsied, 





276 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


it was enormously difficult to prove that he had really 
been the Promised One. 

No doubt that was why the disciples began to piece 
together the genealogies we find in the Gospels. No 
doubt that, too, was why those extravagant legends con- 
cerning the conception, birth, childhood, and ministry 
of Jesus began to be devised. Uncharitable critics may 
say the disciples resorted to fraud in these matters—but 
it was all intensely pious and well-intentioned fraud. 
Before the ordinary Jew could be made to accept Jesus 
as the Messiah, Jesus simply had to be proved a descen- 
dant of David, whose whole life had been a literal ful- 
filment of the ancient prophecies. The disciples may 
not have been even remotely conscious that they were 
departing from the truth when they solemnly repeated 
those genealogies and stories. Overzealous disciples 
never are.). , > 

But even with all those new proofs and appealing 
legends to convince them, the Jewish people as a whole 
still refused to accept the Messiahship of Jesus. “They 
obstinately kept on awaiting the first coming of the 
Anointed One, praying for his advent day and night. 
And the Nazarenes remained obscure, and few in 
number. 


II. CHRIST 


AND then something happened. Of a sudden—at 
least, so it seemed to those who had not marked the 
mounting of its steady ground swell—that little Naza- 
rene sect, so long but an eddy unfelt even in tiny Judea, 
became a high sea that broke and rolled across the whole 
Roman Empire. A veritable tidal wave it became, 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE Lid. 


sweeping over one land after another until finally it 
had inundated the whole face of the West and half the 
face of the East. To explain how that could have 
happened, one must remember what was going on just 
then in the Roman Empire. A great hunger was gnaw- 
ing at its vitals, a desperate hunger for salvation. The 
whole Roman world seemed to be writhing in the throes 
of death, and fear of that death drove it to a frantic and 
panicky clutching after any and every chance of life. As 
a result, the mysteries, those secret cults which whipped 
men into mad orgies of hopefulness, flourished every- 
where. 

We have already dealt at some length in this volume 
with those mysteries of Greece and Rome. In origin 
they were largely Oriental, and in essence they grew out 
of the belief that by certain magic rites a man could take 
on the nature of an immortal god. In most instances 
that god was portrayed as a young hero who had been 
murdered treacherously and then miraculously brought 
to life again. “That same legend was told—with varia- 
tions, of course—concerning Dionysus, Osiris, Orpheus, 
Attis, Adonis, and heaven knows how many other such 
gods. Arising out of the common desire for an explana- 
tion of the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, that 
legend was common to many parts of the world, and 
was believed during unnumbered centuries. It became 
the basis of a dozen different religions, providing all 
of them with the rcot-dogma that by means of sacrifices, 
spells, prayers, trances, or other such devices, mortal 
man could become immortal. By the first century of 
this era, the legead had spread to every civilized prov- 
ince in the Roman Empire—save, of course, that stub- 





278 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


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THE SAVIOR-GODS 


bornly resisting little province of Judea—and had 
everywhere made the people drunk with the heady liquor 
of its mystery salvation. 

And side by side with these religious cults flourishing 
among the lower elements in the population of the Em- 
pire, different schools of philosophic thought flourished 
among the more learned folk. One of these was the 
philosophy developed in the city of Alexandria by an 
Egyptian Jew named Philo. According to this philoso- 
phy, God, the Father of All, was too vast to have direct 
contact with the earth, and therefore manifested him- 
self only through an intermediary called the Logos, the 
“Word.” This Logos, which was sometimes called 
the ‘Son of God’’ or the ‘‘Holy Ghost,’ had created the 
earth, and was the sole mediator between it and heaven. 
Man’s only approach to the Father, therefore, was 


WAAR RENEDGIN EUROPE Ds) 


through this Logos, this “‘Son’’; man’s only chance of 
entering heaven was by letting the ‘‘Spirit’’ flood his 
soul. Man could find a way out for himself, only by 
losing himself in the ‘‘Holy Ghost.”” . . 


2 


THE cults and the philosophies we have just described 
were not the only elements in the religious life and 
thought of the Empire. Not even remotely. But they 
were among the dominant elements, and they could not 
but have influenced every educated citizen of the Empire. 
That excluded, of course, the humble Nazarenes in far- 
off Palestine. They were neither educated, nor citizens 
of the Empire. They were merely Palestinian Jews, 
poor artisans and peasants most of whom knew no 
tongue save the Aramaic dialect used in their homes and 
synagogues. And if in later years the Nazarene faith 
began to take on the color and shape of those heathen 
cults and strange philosophies, these Palestinian Naz- 
arenes were not in the least responsible. It was one from 
outside the original brotherhood, a Jew from beyond 
the borders of Palestine, who was responsible. It was 
Saul of Tarsus who brought on that change. 

Saul was both a Jew and a citizen of the Empire. He 
was born in Tarsus in Asia Minor, a city of some con- 
sequence as a trading center and a seat of learning; 
and while still a boy he seems to have distinguished him- 
self as a student. A Pharisee, and the descendant of 
Pharisees, his chief training was in Rabbinic law; but 
he also knew Greek, and must have had rather more than 
a passing acquaintance with Greek and Alexandrian 
philosophy. Most important of all, he must very early 





280 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


have learnt from slaves in the household, or from Gentile 
playmates, of the mystery cults which were prevalent in 
his native city, and of the savior-gods in whom the 
masses put their impassioned trust. . . . Despite these 
early heathen influences, however, Saul remained a Jew. 
When grown to young manhood he even went down 
from ‘Tarsus to Jeru- 
salem so that he might 
complete his religious 
studies under the great 
Rabbi Gamaliel there. 
(It seems not to have 
been uncommon for the 
sons of wealthy Jews 
living outside the home- 
land to come to Jeru- 
salem to finish their edu- 
cation.) And there in 
Jerusalem Saul for the 
first time came in con- 
tact with the Nazarenes. 
. . «. Now Saul was a 
person of very violent 
likes and dislikes, and 
when he heard what 
those Nazarenes were 
preaching, he was convulsed with anger. He is said to 
have been an epileptic, and certainly he was a man of 
strange temperament. Whatever he did, he did with an 
intensity and an extravagance that were distinctly ab- 
normal. So that when he took his initial dislike to the 
Nazarenes, he could not merely shrug his shoulders in 





SAUL OF TARSUS 


WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 281 


disapproval and let them be. He had to persecute them. 
Nor was he content with persecuting them merely in 
Jerusalem. On hearing that their movement was grow- 
ing virulently in Damascus, he actually dropped his 
studies and set out to run them down there as well. 

But on the way to Damascus a queer thing happened 
to him. He was suddenly overcome by a seizure of 
some sort, and in a trance a vision came to him of the 
resurrected Jesus. A “‘light from heaven” shone round 
about him, and a voice cried out: ‘‘Saul, Saul, why 
dost thou persecute me?’’ And when, trembling and 
astonished, Saul came to himself, behold he was a 
changed man! 

When he got to Damascus he arose in the synagogue, 
and instead of persecuting the Nazarenes, he began 
actually to praise them. He had become a complete 
convert to their cause, believing in the Messiahship of 
Jesus and in his resurrection with an _ unshakable 
conviction. 

Saul had never seen Jesus in the flesh or come under 
the spell of his loving gospel. But that made no differ- 
ence to him. Actually he was but little interested in the 
gospel of the man Jesus; he was interested only in the 
death and rebirth of the savior-god, Christ. Cnrristos 
is the Greek word for “Anointed One,’’ and Saui, whose 
mother tongue was Greek, built his whole personal faith 
around that word. He became the great preacher of 
“Christ crucified,’’ journeying about all over the Em- 
pire, to Cilicia, Galatia, Macedonia, the islands of the 
Mediterranean, and even Rome, in a great passion to 
have the world share with him his belief. . . . 





282 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


° 


AND thus at last Christianity as a world religion was 
really founded. Jesus had not founded what the world 
calls Christianity, for Jesus had lived and died a Jew 
within the fold of Judaism. Jesus had lived and labored 
merely to guide his fellow Jews to those elements in 
their own Jewish religion which might make their sorry 





THE WANDERINGS OF PAUL 


lives glorious. He had tried but to lead them to salva- 
tion through distinctly Jewish channels, and he had on 
occasion even turned away heathens who had come to 
him for help. He was not the founder of Christianity, 
butts founding ese 

Nor had his immediate disciples created the new faith. 
They had remained conforming Jews, and the Messiah 
put forward by them had all along been the Jewish 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 283 


Messiah. The Kingdom of Heaven they had dreamed 
of inheriting was a kingdom reserved primarily for 
Jews. 

Nor was it Saul, the studious young Pharisee, who 
founded the new faith, but his other self, Paul, the citi- 
zen of Rome. (He changed his name sometime after 
the conversion.) There are two hostile selves, the Saul 
and the Paul, in almost every sensitive Jew who has ever 
lived in the Gentile world. The one tries to hold him 
fast within the small and limiting circle of his own 
people; the other tries to draw him out into the wide, 
free circle of the world. And because in this instance 
the man was of so intense a nature, the conflict was all 
the more marked. What-time the Saul in him was tri- 
umphant, this man was ready actually to murder every 
Jew in whom the Paul so much as lifted its head. And 
when the Paul in him got the upper hand, he was all 
for putting an end to the Sauls. He openly proclaimed 
that all the laws which kept Jew apart from Gentile 
were now no longer of any worth. With the coming of 
the Christ there had come a new dispensation, he be- 
lieved. Circumcized and uncircumcized were now alike, 
and he that ate ‘‘defilement’’ was no less in the sight of 
Christ than he that scrupulously kept all the Mosaic 
laws. For the Christ was not the Messiah merely of 
the Jews: he was the Savior of all mankind. The shed- 
ding of his blood had washed away the sin of all men, 
and now one need but believe in him to be saved. No 
more than that was demanded: believe in Christ, and 
one was redeemed! 

And it was due to this breaking down of the ‘Wall 
of Law”’ that the Nazarene faith, so long obscure and 





284 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


unnoticed in tiny Judea, flooded out and inundated the 
world. 

It is unfair to compare Paul to Jesus, for the two be- 
longed spiritually and intellectually to entirely different 
orders of men. “The one was‘a prophet and a dreamer 
of dreams; the other was an organizer and a builder of 
churches. In his own class Paul was one of the stupen- 
dously great men of the earth. If at moments he could 
be violent and ungracious, he was nevertheless a superb 
statesman. And he was possessed of an energy, a 
courage, and an indomitable will, the like of which have 
rarely been known in all the history of great men. 
Again and again he was scourged and imprisoned by 
the outraged elders of the synagogues in which he tried 
to preach. (Paul usually tried to obtain a hearing in 
the local synagogue whenever he arrived in a strange 
city.) Mobs were set on him; more than once he had 
to flee for his life. “The orthodox Jews looked on him 
as an apostate, and some even of his own fellow Naz- 
arenes fought to depose him from leadership. All the 
years of his ministry he was plagued by Jews who hated 
him, Nazarenes who distrusted him, and Gentiles who 
could hardly make out what he was talking about. And 
yet he persisted, never resting from his grueling labor 
of carrying his Christ to the Gentiles, incessantly run- 
ning to and fro, incessantly preaching, writing, arguing, 
and comforting, until at last, a tired and broken man, he 
died a martyr’s death in the city of Rome... . 


4 


IT was in the year 67, according to tradition, that 
Paul was beheaded by the Romans. He had spent per- 


WEA oie: OU ROPE 285 


haps thirty years in the labor of spreading the idea of 
Christ, and by the time of his death that idea had already 
struck root far and wide in the Empire. It had divorced 
itself from Judaism, taking over the Sunday of the 
Mithraists in place of the Jewish Sabbath, and substitut- 
ing Mithraist ritual for Temple sacrifice. In most of 
the cities there were already thriving Christian brother- 
hoods, little secret societies much like those of the mys- 
teries, but with greater proselyting passion. While the 
leaders were still for the most part converted Jews, the 
membership was largely of pagan origin. And as, with 
the passing of the years, the pagan element grew ever 
more preponderant, pagan ideas came more and more to 
dominate the religion. ‘The life-story of Jesus was em- 
bellished with a whole new array of marvels and mira- 
cles, and the man himself was made over into a veritable 
mystery savior-god. His character and nature fell into 
the maw of an alien philosophy, and then came drooling 
out in sodden and swollen distortion. He became the 
Lamb whose blood washed away all sin... He became 
the Son of God supernaturally conceived by the Virgin 
Mary when the Holy Ghost of God the Father entered 
into her womb. He became the Logos and the Avatar 
and the Savior. And throughout the Empire little 
churches were to be found in which his pictures (extra- 





1 Those who remember the description of the pagan Tauroboleum 
given in the chapter on Rome will find this good Christian hymn pro. 
foundly suggestive: 


“There is a fountain filled with blood 
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; 

And sinners plunged beneath that flood 
Lose all their guilty stains.’’ 





286 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


ordinarily like those of Horus) were worshipped, and 
in which his ‘‘flesh and blood’’ (amazingly like the 
symbols used in the magical rites of Mithras) were taken 
in communion. 

That is why this section is entitled ‘““What Happened 
in Europe.’’ Although the religion of Jesus and of 
the first disciples was distinctly Oriental, although the 
whole Messiah idea was markedly a thing out of the 
East, the religion about a Savior Christ was largely Eu- 
ropean. And it was no less far a cry from the one to 
the other than was the distance from Nazareth to Rome. 
Indeed, one gravely doubts whether Jesus, the simple 
peasant teacher in hilly Galilee, would have known who 
in the world that Savior Christ was! .. . 

But it was inevitable for that change to come about. » 
Christianity in those years was gaining too many con- 
verts too rapidly. It would not have been so bad had 
they been converts from a world of ignorance—that is. 
converts who had naught to forget when they came over 
to the new faith. But they were converts instead from 
a world of what we would call stupidity. Their minds 
were crowded with fears and superstitions and magic 
rites and extravagant dogmas which they were supposed 
to forget when they became Christians—but they never 
succeeded in forgetting them. So it was inevitable, we 
repeat, that this new faith, oversuccessful as it was in 
hurriedly displacing the old, should in the end become 
very like unto the old. 

But for all that growing likeness, a significant element 
of disparity always remained. There was a zeal, a 
missionary ardor, in the early church that was largely 
unknown in the older cults. There was a constant run- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 287 


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CHRIS TIANITX IN: b10°A," D. 


ning to and fro of prophets and deacons from one center 
to another, and a diligent spreading of tracts and epistles 
among all who could read. ‘There were, for instance, 
the letters of Paul giving advice on matters of ad- 
ministration, and explaining matters of doctrine to 
various of the little churches he had founded. And later 
there were the Gospels. “The Gospels, as we now have 
them, could not have been written by the disciples whose 
names they bear, for they are written in Greek, and 
the native language of most of those disciples was 
Aramaic. Nor do they seem to have been direct transla- 
tions from Aramaic accounts. Scholars today are agreed 
that the earliest of them is the one entitled ‘“The Gospel 
according to Mark,”’ and they date it about the year 65 
—that is, thirty-five years after the crucifixion. The 
latest of the Gospels, that of John, with its unconscious 





288 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


effort to make Jesus fit the Logos, could not have been 
written (according to many of the scholars) until well 
after the year 100. Such writings must have been circu- 
lated freely by the missionaries wherever they ventured, 
and it is evident that they were distinctly effective. No 
such testaments could be offered by the priests of Mith- 
ras, Cybele, or Attis, for their deities were after all 
mythical. Only the Christians had a real man to wor- 
ship: a unique and divine man, it is true, but never- 
theless a person who had known human woe and pain, 
who had suffered, and who had for at least three days 
been dead. ‘That element of naturalism, of closeness to 
human reality, must have made Christianity a faith of 
extraordinary attractiveness. 

And being so attractive, it rapidly began to eat into 
the ranks of the other mysteries. It won away their 
followers at such a rate that it began at last to present 
a distinct menace to the Roman governors. Spread 
everywhere, from the Thames to the Euphrates, its half- 
secret brotherhoods formed what amounted to an empire 
within the Empire. Its initiates fanatically refused to 
conduct themselves like Roman gentlemen. They op- 
posed the basic institutions of the Roman social system, 
and they hated the theater and the gladiatorial shows, 
the chief amusements of the time. Worse still, they 
refused absolutely to worship the Emperor as god, thus 
openly inviting the suspicion of disloyalty to Rome. So 
attempts at suppression were in the nature of things 
almost unavoidable. 

At first the Christians were persecuted only to gratify 
the lusts of the Roman mob; but later more systematic 
efforts had to be made. After the year 303 the imperial 








WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 289 





government realized that its very existence was in dan- 
ger so long as Christianity was allowed to flourish, and 
it therefore made one supreme attempt utterly to annihi- 
late the revolutionary cult. “The churches were burnt 
down, all copies of the Gospels and Epistles were de- 
stroyed, and the Christians themselves were martyred 
by the score. The government seemed determined to 
stamp out Christianity, as modern governments seek to 
stamp out Communism or Pacifism or Anarchism. 
(Early Christianity, according to Prof. Gilbert Murray, 
might indeed have seemed to the Romans what “‘a 
blend of pacifist international socialist with some mys- 
tical Indian sect, drawing its supporters mainly from an 
oppressed and ill-liked foreign proletariat, such as the 
‘hunkey’ population of some big American towns, full 
of the noblest moral professions but at the same time 
aliens,’’ would seem to modern men of affairs.) “There 
were tortures and executions beyond number, and the 
jails were filled with Christian devotees. 

But nevertheless the movement grew. There was a 
wondrous comfort in that religion, a mighty zeal that 
made it possible for the martyrs to go to their death 
actually with a smile on their lips. It took vile slaves 
out of the slums where they rotted, and somehow 
breathed supernal heroism into them. It told them that 
sacrifice was at the very core of righteousness, that death 
for the truth could mean only life everlasting. Had not 
the Savior himself died for the truth? Of a surety, 
therefore, he would not desert those who died likewise. 
He would take up their tortured souls in his comforting 
arms, and heal them in Heaven where he reigned. Death 
could have no sting for them, nor the grave any victory, 








290 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


for the Crucified Christ would be with them and bring 
them through to blessedness eternal! .. . 

So no matter how madly Rome hounded the Chris- 
tians, Christianity could not be crushed. 


5 


AND then came Constantine and, in the year 313, an 
end to the persecutions. Constantine was born out in 


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CHRISTIANITY AFTER CONSTANTINE 





Servia, and is reported to have been the illegitimate son 
of a Roman general and a village barmaid. He was in- 
ordinately ambitious, and by dint of much energy, 
intrigue, and not a little use of murder, he managed to 
raise himself actually to the imperial throne. But his 
position was challenged by a rival emperor, and in his 
dire need of help from any and every quarter, Con- 
stantine suddenly turned to the Christians. With char- 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 291 


acteristic shrewdness he realized that those fanatical 
Christ-worshippers were a power to be reckoned with. 
Here they were, established everywhere, and possessed 
of an insuperable will-to-live. Constantine probably 
had no clear idea as to what it was they really believed. 
He may have thought them Mithraists who for some 
queer reason, best known to themselves, worshipped a 
cross. But he did know that they were becoming politi- 
cally of superlative importance. So he began officially 
to favor them, showering their churches with wealth. 
He had the intelligence to see that they were the sole 
unifying force left in the disrupted empire. They 
formed one vast and powerful brotherhood that rami- 
fied everywhere. And Constantine, whose chief concern 
was the finding of some way of bolstering up the tot- 
tering empire, felt forced to resort to them for help. 

And thus it came about that a fervent hope in the 
heart of an obscure little Levantine race, and a sweet doc- 
trine of love and peace preached by a simple young 
Levantine peasant, became three hundred years later the 
official religion of the greatest empire the world had 
ever known! ... 


6 


BUT it was a costly triumph for Christianity, as every 
other such triumph has been in all history. What hap- 
pened to Buddhism when it set out to conquer the Far 
East, now happened also to Christianity in the West. 
It became an official and successful institution—and so 
degenerated. A faith cannot be institutionalized, for it 
is a thing of the spirit. Even dogmas or rites, which 
are things almost of the flesh, cannot be organized 





PO, THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


beyond certain bounds. So that even after Christianity 
became primarily a thing of dogmas and rites, it never- 
theless began to crack and crumble. All sorts of schisms 
occurred. In the process of organizing the idea of the 
Christ, a myriad differences arose. Paul had used his 
theological terms rather loosely, and had spoken of God, 
the Son of God, and the Spirit of God. Now, were these 
three the names of one Person or three? Was the Son 
of God actually God Himself, or merely similar to God? 
Was the Spirit of God a part of or separate from 
God? . . . Paul had spoken of a Divine Christ and 
a human Jesus. Well, then, were these two beings one, 
or really two? And if they were one, when had they 
coalesced? Had Jesus never been a human being, but 
the Christ from the very beginning of creation? Or had 
he become united with the Christ at the moment of his 
conception or birth? Or had the Christ descended upon 
him when at the age of thirty he was baptized by John? 
. . . Paul had spoken of Jesus as a Savior. He had 
said that God, the loving Father, had sacrificed His only- 
begotten Son to redeem the world. But why should 
God have found it necessary to make any such sacrifice? 
To whom could He, the All-powerful, be beholden? 
For that matter, if He was indeed the God of forgive- 
ness, why had He not forgiven without ever bringing 
the agony of the crucifixion to His beloved Son? Could 
it be that there were really two Gods: the unforgiving 
God of the Old Testament, and the forgiving God of 
the New? ... } 

Scores of such questions arose to perplex and divide 
the organizers of the religion. Jesus had not been con- 
scious of even the most ponderous of such questions 


a ~ 


WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 293 


That dear, fervent young preacher, who had lived and 
died in the sublimity of a simple faith, could never 
possibly have been conscious of them. Had he heard 
them posed, he would probably have shaken his head in 
mute bewilderment. . . . But in Europe three centuries 
later, such abstruse metaphysical enigmas were consid- 
ered the very bone and sinew of the religion. The early 
church fathers disputed over them with a heat and rancor 
that sometimes did not stop even at murder. When 
one puts beside the Gospel accounts of the preachings 
of Jesus, the official records of the wranglings and bicker- 
ings of those church fathers, one feels that here is to be 
found the most tragic and sordid epic of frustration that 
the whole history of mankind can tell... . 


7 


BUT the rest of the chapters of that epic cannot be 
told here. In all fairness no more may be done here 
for Christianity than has been done for the other great 
religions of the world, and having told of the founding 
of the church, and of its original faith, room remains 
for no more than a broad hint as to its later development. 

More than sixteen hundred years have passed since 
Christianity was made the state religion in the decadent 
Roman Empire. Throughout all those years it has 
been extending its borders, winning new converts in 
every pagan land on earth. It is estimated that at the 
present time about one-third of the entire population 
of the world is Christian—approximately five hundred 
and sixty-five million souls. ‘There is hardly a region 
on earth where there is not a church bearing its name 
or, in default of that, some zealous missionary trying 





294 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


his utmost to erect a church. And of course, it is to 
the spirit of Paul regnant in Christendom that one must 
credit that enormous expansion. It is because countless 
monks and healers and warriors and saints have felt 
Paul’s call to go out and win the heathen to Christ, 
that today more souls are turned to Christ than to any 
other deity on earth. 

But as we have already pointed out, these wholesale 
increases in numbers were not made save at a high price. 
Grave compromises had to be made everywhere with 
the defeated cults. Just as Buddha had to be idolized 
before he could conquer the East, so Jesus had to be 
idolized to gain his victory over the West. His mother 
had to be idolized, too, for pagan Europe loved its 
goddesses too intensely to consent to forswear them en- 
tirely. Indeed, during the medieval centuries Mary 
seems to have been revered, in practice if not in dogma, 
even more than her son. Much of the old love for 
Isis, and especially for Cybele, the great Mother of the 
Gods, was taken over into the church and translated 
into the worship of Mary, the Mother of Christ. . 
Similarly the worship of the old local deities was made 
a part of Christianity. The pagan gods and goddesses 
were discreetly made over into Christian saints, as is 
instanced by the case of St. Bridget. Their ‘“‘relics’’ 
were sold far and wide in Christendom as fetishes guar- 
anteed to ward off evil; and their ancient festive days 
were made part of the Christian calendar. The Roman 
Parilia in April became the Festival of St. George, and 
the pagan midsummer orgy in June was converted into 
the Festival of St. John; the holy day of Diana in Au- 
gust became the Festival of the Assumption of The 








WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 295 


C ZB 





A PRIESTESS OF BRIDGET 


Virgin; and the Celtic feast of the dead in November was 
changed into the Festival of All Souls. The twenty- 
fifth of December—the winter solstice according to an- 
cient reckoning—celebrated as the birthday of the sun- 
god of Mithraism, was accepted as the birthday of 
Christ, and the spring rites in connection with the death 
and rebirth of the mystery gods were converted into the 
Easter rites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. .. . 

Yet despite all these compromises, the new religion 
remained always heavens above the old. By assimilat- 
ing pagan rites and myths and even god-names, Chris- 
tianity became at last almost completely pagan in sem- 
blance; but it never became quite pagan in character. 
The Old Testament puritanism which had so marked 
the life of Jesus was never routed. It remained like a 


296 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


moral emetic in the faith, forcing it to throw up the lust 
and license in the pagan rites it assimilated. If the spirit 
of Paul insisted that Cybele be taken over as the Mother 
of Christ, the spirit of Jesus insisted that her wild 
Corybantes with their lustful rites, and her holy eunuchs 
with their revolting perversions, be left severely behind. 
If the spirit of Paul demanded that the wild Celtic 
goddess named Bridget be accepted into Christianity, the 
spirit of Jesus demanded that first she be made lily-white 
and a saint. For the spirit of Jesus was innately Jewish 
and puritanical. It set its face hard against sacred pros- 
titution and against all those other loosenesses and ob- 
scenities which arose out of the pagan’s free attitude to- 
ward sex. It hated license and beast passion in any 
form, whether it showed itself in feast, tourney, or 
battle. Inexorably it insisted on moral decency and 
restraint. 

For that reason Christianity never became quite pagan 
in spirit. It remained too profoundly concerned with 
ethics. “The old mysteries had been largely devoid of ~ 
any distinct ethical emphasis. Most of them had prom- 
ised immortality to their initiates as a reward for the 
mere mechanical performance of certain prescribed rites. 
Few of them had pried into the private life of an initiate 
to discover whether he was good or bad in his daily 
conduct. Few of them had been in the least interested 
in daily conduct. Morality had become completely re- 
ligionized with most of them. They had maintained 
that to be saved one need be merely ritually proper, not 
ethically clean. 

That was just where Christianity differed most radi- 
cally from even the highest of the old mystery cults. 





WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 297 


The spirit of Jesus flickering in Christianity made it at 
least nominally a religion of ethics. For Jesus, one 
must remember, had not been in the least concerned with 
ritual. Like every other great Jewish prophet, he had 
preached only ethics. And despite all the compromises 
of the world-conquering Pauls, that ethical emphasis 
in the teaching of Jesus persisted as a mighty leaven in 
the church. It gave to the early Christians that gentle 
nobility which history tells us graced their lives, and 
that hercic stubbornness which certainly marked their 
faith. It took hold of wild berserker races and somehow 
frowned them to order. It took hold of a savage 
Europe and somehow subdued it, civilized it. Not alto- 
gether, cf course. The history of Europe, with all its 
wars and recurrent brutalities, can hardly be called the 
history of a civilized continent. Even the church itself, 
with its foul record of crusades and inquisitions and 
pogroms, cannot be said to have ever been really civi- 
lized. But that admission does not at all discredit the 
potency of the spirit of Jesus. It merely reveals how 
tremendous were the odds against it, how brutal was the 
world it sought to make divine. ‘True, there were 
indeed Dark Ages in Europe when the power of the 
Church was at its height. But who knows how far 
darker they might have been, and how much longer they 
might have endured, had the Church not existed? True, 
there were indeed religious wars early and late in Chris- 
tendom, but who knows how much bitterer and more 
devastating they might have been had they been tribal 
or racial wars. For wars were inevitable. A world 
with too little food and too much spleen simply had to 


298 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


fight. If religious differences had not been at hand, 
other excuses would have been found for warring. And 
because those other excuses would have been deeper. 
rooted and more primitive, they would no doubt have 
brought on infinitely more dreadful desolations. Wars 
for Christ, after all, could never be fought with a blood- 
lust utterly free and untrammeled. Their virulence was 
always partially sapped by the innate irony of their pre- 
tensions. ‘The insistent pacifism of him in whose name 
those wars were fought could not but have had some 
tempering influence. None can doubt that the adoration 
of a Prince of Peace, the worship of a Good Shepherd, 
even though drugged almost dead with ritual, must have 
had a profound effect on the people. None can doubt 
that the veneration of a gentle, loving, helpless youth as 
the very incarnation of perfection must have been as 
ice to the hot blood of the race. . 

One must remember that Christianity came into a 
world that was sinking—sinking momentarily into an 
abyss of savagery. And it was almost the only force 
that sought to stay that debacle. It alone sought to 
keep civilization going. It failed. It could not keep 
from failing. But be it said to its glory that at least 
iho tried sas were 


8 


HOWEVER, the glory of trying to save the world from 
bestiality belongs primarily to but one element alone 
in Christianity: the original Nazarene element. And 
that element, one must remember, was never dominant 
in the faith save during those years before it was really 
Christian. Once Paul came on the scene, the light of 














WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 299 











the religion of Jesus began to fade, and the glare of the 
religion about Christ blazed over all. Yet though the 
light from Galilee faded, though for a while it died 
down into no more than a mere lingering spark, it never 
Was quite snuffed out. For long centuries it smouldered 
there, barely living, barely keeping aglow. The com- 
promising, theologizing, church-organizing religion 
about Christ blazed away unchallenged. In the West 
it gave rise to the Holy Roman Empire, that pathetic 
travesty which was never holy or Roman or imperial. 
In the East it created a farrago of sects arising from 
fatuous differences as to the metaphysical nature of 
Christ. . . . And then slowly that forgotten spark 
began to brighten once more. A devastating incursion 
of Huns and Saracens blew the spark to a flame. As 
never before in full six hundred years, the Christians 
began to think again of their suffering Savior. And like 
a mad fire the hope spread over Europe that the year 
1000 would see the return of the Redeemer. 

The year 1000 passed and no Redeemer came—but 
Europe was a little redeemed nevertheless. Its spirit was 
sobered and its life deepened. “The hunger for salvation 
became too strong and acute to be allayed with mere 
ritual any longer. Men turned from what the Church of 
Christ insisted on offering them, and instead began to 
grope after the gospel of Jesus for themselves. “They 
took to reading the Scriptures in their original tongues, 
and reading them they began to see at last how far the 
Church had wandered from the pristine truth. They 
discovered at last how shamelessly the priests had sub- 
stituted rite for right, how flagrantly they had ritualized 
all morality. Heretical sects arose everywhere, and the 





300 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


clerical authorities took alarm. Despotically they issued 
proclamations prohibiting the laity from even glancing 
at the Bible, and the priesthood from interpreting it save 
in accordance with the tradition of the Church. “Then 
they instituted the Inquisition to see that the prohibition 
was observed. | 

But the Bible was read nevertheless. Inquisitions and 
crusades and massacres proved of no avail. ‘The flame 
of heresy burned on, and not even a sea of blood was 
enough to quench it. In the fourteenth century, Wy- 
cliffe did godly mischief in England; in the fifteenth, 
John Huss carried on in Bohemia; in the sixteenth, 
Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin led the protestant revolt 
throughout northern Europe. And thenceforth the 
Catholic Church ceased to be catholic any more even in 
the West. Land after land went over to the heretics, 
and European Christianity was cleft in two. 

But one must not imagine that Protestantism was 
ever purely Nazarene in spirit—any more than Catholi- 
cism was ever unrelievedly Pauline. (Bishop Laud in 
the seventeenth century was a Protestant, while St. 
Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century was a Catho- 
lic. . . .) Protestantism includes every type of reli- 
gious thought and organization from “high church’ 
Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecsta- 
tic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarianism. 
Only slowly, and with many pangs, is even Protes- 
tantism shaking off the religion about Christ. Only 
slowly, very slowly, is it beating its way back to the 
religion of Jesus. . . 

And with that word we must leave the tale of what 
happened in Europe. The story of Christianity is long 


WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE 301 


and bewildering, for it stretches through twenty cen- 
turies and is written in a hundred tongues. In part 
it is a story of almost incredible rapacity and bitterness, 
of incessant war and intrigue, and low, greedy self- 
seeking. But in far larger part it is a story of wondrous 
kindness and saving grace. [hough the Church of 
Christ may stand guilty of untold and untellable evil, 
the religion of Jesus, which is the little light glimmering 
behind that ecclesiastical bushel, has accomplished good 
sufficient to outweigh that evil tenfold. For it has 
made life livable for countless millions of harried souls. 
It has taken rich and poor, learned and ignorant, white, 
red, yellow, and black—it has taken them all and tried 
to show them a way to salvation. To all in pain it 
has held out a balm; to all in distress it has offered peace. 
To every man without distinction it has said: Jesus 
died for you! ‘To every human creature on earth it has 
said: You too can be saved! And therein lies Chris- 
tianity’s highest virtue. It has helped make the weak 
strong and the dejected happy. It has stilled the fear 
that howls in man’s breast, and crushed the unrest that 
gnaws at his soul. In a word, it has worked—in a 
measure. . . 


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BOOK EIGHT 
WHAT HAPPENED IN ARRABIA 
I. MOHAMMEDANISM 


1: The idolatrous religion of primitive Arabia—Mecca and the 
Kaaba. 2: The story of Mohammed—his gospel. 3: The 
preaching of the gospel to the Meccans. 4: The preaching to 
the pilgrims. 5. The flight to Medina. 6: The Jews retuse to 
be converted—conflict with Mecca. 7: The militarv character 
of Islam—the Holy War. 8: The character of Mohammed— 
his compromises—the pagan elements in Islam. 9: The quali- 
ties in the religion. 


BOOK EIGHT 
WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 
I. MOHAMMEDANISM 


Wsg)ND now we are come to the 
=== founding of the latest—perhaps 
the last—of the great world re- 
| ligions: Islam. For the third 
4 time the Arabian Desert plays 
a major part in the history of 
our believing world. In that 
region's giant womb there had 
already been conceived the Ba- 
bylonian worship of Ishtar and 
. the Hebrew worship of Yahveh. 
Now, more than two rien years after the birth of 
that second child, the desert conceived and brought forth 
yet a third: the Mohammedan worship of Allah. 

The religion of the Arabian Desert in the sixth century 
A. D. was much what it had been a thousand or even two 
thousand years earlier. Changes come rarely in the 
desert, for rarely are its denizens able to remain in any 
one place long enough to advance or even decay. There- 
fore, long centuries after the East had gone Buddhist 
and the West had gone Christian, Arabia, that vast 
wasteland pinched between East and West, still remained 
crudely animist. Each bedouin tribe worshipped its own 
tribal fetishes, rocks and trees and stars; and the only ap- 
proximation to a national cult among them was a gen- 
305 


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306 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


eral awe of a particular fetish resting in the city of Mecca. 
This fetish, a black rock enshrined in a small square 
temple called the Kaaba, was thought to be possessed 
of dreadful potency. An energetic priesthood arose in 
Mecca, and perhaps it was largely responsible for the 
national reputation enjoyed by that fetish. Perhaps, 
too, that priesthood was largely responsible for the na- 
tional custom of making pilgrimages to Mecca. From 
every end of the desert the tribesmen were wont to 
straggle down to Mecca during one season of the year, 
in order to prostrate themselves before the Kaaba. And 
just as the merchants of a modern city arrange for mini- 
mum exactions by the railway men for all those coming 
to a convention in their midst, so the priests of ancient 
Mecca arranged for minimum hazards from highway- 
men for all those on pilgrimage to the Kaaba. Some- 
how they forced the whole land to recognize and respect 
a solemn taboo against waylaying pilgrims. During 
four months in the year the open desert, where every 
shepherd clan was also a robber band, became as safe 
as a walled city to all who were on their way to Mecca. 
And as a result, Mecca became not merely the religious 
center, but also the great market-place of Arabia. In 
a land where wealth was almost nonexistent, and 
authority seemed scattered beyond hope of concentration, 
Mecca somehow managed to become rich and unchal- 
lengeably powerful. 


2 


NOW in about the year 570 A.D. there was born in 
this city a child to whom was given the name Ubu'I- 
Kassim. In later years he came to be called Mohammed, 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 307 


the “‘Praised One,”’ just as Gautama came to be called 
Buddha, the “Enlightened One,’”’ and Jesus came to be 
called Christ, the ““Anointed One.”’ But to Ubu'- 
Kassim in his early years was accorded very little praise. 
Although he was of the priestly caste, he belonged—like 
Jeremiah in Israel, and perhaps Zoroaster in Iran—to a 
branch of the caste that had been crowded and elbowed 
out of power. (Cynical historians find in that cir- 
cumstance the major reason why Jeremiah and Zoro- 
aster and Mohammed ever attacked the ruling priest- 
hoods in their lands.) The lad was orphaned while 
still young, and because his immediate relatives were for 
the most part poor, he soon had to shift for himself. He 
became a camel-driver, and went off with trading cara- 
vans as far as Syria and perhaps even to Egypt. He was 
grossly untutored, of course, and probably could neither 
read nor write. But he was quick-witted and had an 
insatiably inquisitive mind. Unlike the ofher Arab 
camel-boys, his eyes were wide open to the wonders of 
the strange lands he visited, and his ears were pricked 
up to catch all that was being said in the foreign market- 
places. Especially was he inquisitive on the subject of 
the religions in those far away places, for he seems to 
have been innately of a religious temperament. We are 
told he was given to spells of melancholy and to occa- 
sional fits of what may have been epilepsy. (So many 
of the greatest religious leaders in history are said to 
have been epileptics or otherwise neurotic, that psycholo- 
gists are inclined to believe religious genius is somehow 
a result of a disease of the mind. But that is no reflec- 
tion on religion, for every other form of genius seems 













308 THIS BELIEVING WORLD _ 





MOHAMMED WAS A LOWLY CAMEL BOY 


also a product of a disease of the mind—as the pearl is 
a product of a disease in the oyster. . . .) 

We have no undisputable data concerning the early 
life of Mohammed. All we know with any certainty is 
that, after years of travel with the caravans, he managed 
to better his lot by finding favor in the eyes of his em- 
ployer. She was a rich widow named Khadija, and 
the good-looking young man with the large head and 
beautiful black beard so attracted her that finally she 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 309 


decided to marry him. She was already forty, and he 
only twenty-five; but he appears to have acquiesced with 
alacrity. Khadija was a woman of high character and 
understanding, and quite probably Mohammed loved 
her. (He remained true to her until the day of her 
death.) And certainly he must have been grateful to 
her, for in a day she lifted him from the low station of 


a camel-boy to high place as a rich and Saparat ?. 


Meccan trader. 

Relieved of the necessity of earning his livelihood, 
Mohammed now began to indulge his contemplative 
nature. We are told that he went off into the desert 
again and again to commune there with his soul. The 
humdrum life of a rich fruit-and-produce merchant 
did not satisfy him. It was comfortable and yet not 
comforting; it could keep him occupied, but not satisfied. 
Like every other great soul, he was not content with the 
knowledge merely of how to keep alive: he wanted to 
know why. And seeking that higher knowledge, grop- 
ing in a great fury and pain for that ultimate blessedness 
which is called salvation, he finally fought his way 


through to the idea of Islam. It came to him with over-\ 
whelming conviction that there could be but one way | 


out of the confusion which was life: through submission 
to God. Not to any little venomous god pent up in a 
rock or a tree; not to any one of those low djinns or 
spirits which his fear-harried brethren tried to bribe with 
blood and frenzied praise. No, to the One Great God 
who must be in and over all the earth! 

The patron deity of his own particular tribe was 
known as Allah, and, for want of a better name, Mo- 
hammed instinctively gave that one to his new God of 





310 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 
the Universe. But he was not blind to the fact that 
other peoples knew Him by other names. He realized 
that this Allah whom he had just come to know had 
been known to the rest of the world for centuries. Great 
prophets as ancient as Abraham and as recent as Jesus 
had proclaimed this God to the peoples beyond the 
desert. Indeed, every great city had had its prophet of 
this One God—every great city save Mecca. Mecca alone 
was still foul with idol-worship; Mecca alone knew not 
the One Allah. And as Mohammed wandered there in 
the loneliness of the desert, brooding over that evil, it 
seemed to him that at last it must come even Mecca's 
turn to be saved. Even more: the conviction took hold 
of him that he must be its savior. He, Ubu’l-Kassim 
of the tribe of Koreish, he who had risen from squalor 
to be spouse of the wealthiest woman in Mecca, he must 
be Allah’s Apostle to Mecca. Many prophets had come 
before him, and right nobly had they sought to bring 
a measure of the knowledge of Allah to the world. But 
only with him could there come to mankind the final 
knowledge of the One God. For he, Ubu’l-Kassim, 
was none other than the “‘seal of the prophets!”’ 

Such was the conviction that somehow began to take 
hold of that queer and moody fruit-and-produce mer- 
chant of Mecca. When he came to tell of it in later 
years, he declared the conviction had come to him in 
a sudden revelation. He insisted that it had come to 
him miraculously in a vision. Perhaps that was true. 
Being one of that strange band of great religionists— 
the band that includes Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and 
almost every other great prophet of history—-he was 
subject to those psychic storms that do yield ‘‘visions.” 


311 


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WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 


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But one cannot doubt that the sudden revelation came to 


him, as it did to every one of the others, only after a 


long evolution of inward disturbance and uncertainty. 


One can see quite clearly in Mohammed’s conviction the 





abe THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


result of much pondering on the religious notions of the 
Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians he had met in the 
market-places of Syria. In the hidden recesses of Mo- 
hammed’s being, the idea of Allah, the One God, must 
have been welling up for years before at last it flooded 
over the threshold and so imperiously revealed itself to 
his conscious mind. 


b 


BUT from that day forth, Ubu’l-Kassim, the indolent, 
dreamy husband of the rich Khadija, showed himself to 
all the world a changed man. No longer did he seem 
melancholy and lost. He had found himself. He had 
a purpose now: to win idolatrous Mecca to the worship 
of the Omnipotent Allah. 

But he was no reckless fool. He realized that to an- 
nounce himself at once to the whole city as its savior 
would bring him only jeers or worse. So he confided 
his secret first to his wife, and she, perhaps to his amaze- 
ment, neither laughed nor scolded. On the contrary, she 
firmly believed him when he said he had been visited 
by Allah in a splendid vision and had been appointed 
the Prophet of Mecca. And fortified by her confidence, 
he then whispered his tale to others. He still acted dis- 
creetly, however, and approached only his closest friends 
and relatives. And somehow they, too, were impressed. 
They accepted his amazing tale as true, and secretly con- 
vinced others of it, who in turn convinced still others. 
And thus the movement began to spread throughout the 
town. Everything was done with the greatest secrecy, 
for it was realized that if the rulers of the city discovered 
what was on foot, little mercy would be shown to 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 53). 


Mohammed. He would be regarded as the ringleader in 
a political conspiracy, as one who sought to overthrow 
the priests of the Kaaba and rule in their stead; and he 
would be treated accordingly. So the process of winning 
converts had at first to be carried on with the sharpest 
caution. 

But a day came at last when Mohammed's following 
seemed strong enough for him to dare take his life in 
his hands and announce himself. Immediately there 
ensued a tumult in the city, and a great fury of debating 
and strife. [he ruling oligarchy was thrown almost 
into a panic, for when at last Mohammed announced 
himself as the prophet, his following was already too 
large to be crushed out summarily. Diplomatic over- 
tures were made to the pretender (for so he was consid- 
ered by the rulers) ; but he refused to bargain. And then 
less conciliatory means were resorted to. 

Unhappily for the rulers, they could not resort to the 
assassination of Mohammed as a means of putting a 
swift end to the insurrection. Mecca was a holy city, 
and there was a dread taboo against the shedding of any 
blood within its precincts. The person of Mohammed 
could therefore not be touched, and the only possible 
way left of stamping out his rebel movement seemed 
to be by a systematic boycott of his followers. This 
was soon begun, and it brought bitter suffering to the 
poorer of Mohammed's supporteis. But it utterly failed 
to check the movement. It only aroused an enthusiasm 
and a fervor in those devotees of Mohammed that seemed 
able to withstand any privations, Finally, therefore, 
the frustrated rulers were driven to a declaration of 
open war. [hey drove Mohammed and his abettors 


Bib4 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


into one quarter of the city and blockaded them there. 
(The taboo against shedding blood did not prohibit the 
slaughter of people by starvation.) For months the 
Mohammedans were held prisoners in their houses, until 
finally, starved to despair, they surrendered. Moham- 
med, who throughout the siege had been having new 
revelations from Allah, now suddenly announced that 
the One God had assured him it was no sin to worship 
the Meccan djinns and spirits. And with that capitula- 
tion to the idolatry fostered by the priestly oligarchy, 
the blockade was raised and the erstwhile rebels were 
allowed to go free. 

But almost immediately Mohammed repented. Re- 
morse overcame him at his cowardly defection, and he 
cried out that he had sinned. He declared a new revela- 
tion had come to him and made it plain that the previous 
one had been a whisper from the devil. (Mohammed 
had taken over as part of his religion the Persian belief 
in a wicked Ahriman.) ‘There was, after all, to be no 
worship of the Meccan goddesses and spirits, for Allah 
forbade it. In the camp of His true followers there was 
room for the worship only of Allah! ... 

And then persecution began anew. 


4 


BUT this time Mohammed did not remain in the city 
and try to hold out against his enemies. He knew he 
was not equal to it. His first and dearest believer, his 
wife Khadija, had just died; and he was left a dejected 
and broken man. He could not possibly continue facing 
the unrelenting persecution by his enemies—so he fled. 
He stole off to the neighboring oasis of Taif, and tried 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 315 


to gather new converts there. But he failed dismally, 
and finally he was reduced to entering a plea for permis- 
sion to come back to Mecca. ‘The rulers were willing to 
grant it, but on condition that Mohammed altogether 
refrain from ever again stirring up dissension among 
the Meccans. And only on his acceptance of that hu- 
miliating condition was the hapless prophet allowed tc 
drag his way back to Mecca. 

But though fallen so low, the prophet soon began 
to try to rise again. Almost from the moment he re- 
turned, Mohammed began once more to preach his 
iconoclastic doctrine. He was careful, however, to keep 
the letter of the agreement which bound him scrupu- 
lously to avoid preaching to the Meccans themselves. 
Only the strangers in the city, the traders and pilgrims 
and bedouins encamped for the night, did Mohammed 
approach with his gospel. And not infrequently these 
strangers would hearken to him eagerly, for many were 
the Arabs who were ready for his ideas. For centuries 
there had been many tribes of Jews living in the desert. 
For centuries, too, there had been strings of Christian 
traders wandering along all the caravan routes. And 
from these Jews and Christians the whole land of Arabia 
had heard tell of the One God. So when Mohammed 
sat there cross-legged in the bazaars of Mecca, and 
held forth to the strangers gathered in a silent circle 
about him, he uttered religious sentiments for which 
they were already well prepared. 

One pictures him there, that good-looking Arab 
prophet, amid all the traffic and din and stench of that 
Oriental market-place, seated in the half-light of a 
shadowed court and talking, talking, talking of his 


a 


316 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Allah. He talked well; his speech was rich with that 
glowing imagery so dear to the heart of the Oriental. 
He told many tales which he said had been revealed to 
him by Allah, but which actually were only garbled ver- 
sions of the Biblical stories he had heard from the lips 
of Jews and Christians in his youth. He told of Ibra- 
him, the first of the prophets, and of Ishmael his son, the 
founder of Mecca. He discoursed also on Suleiman, the 


(pda gnc eacagy PAA SAMMY pga ta) 


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At yt AS ON eas : ft: 
Tea) 


‘Hii acy Ze hy 





MOHAMMED SAT IN THE BAZAARS AND PREACHED 


great king, and on Jesus, who had been born in a 
manger. And the eyes of his auditors twinkled with 
delight in the dimness of the courtyard. ... Or he 
told of the paradise which all true believers would in- 
herit, and the eyes of the listeners gleamed with eager- 
ness; or of the devil’s hell, and their eyes fairly popped 
Wit etoh tii, ene 

~ At death, said this prophet, the soul of the believer 


a se nn A TTT rey 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 317 


was lifted gently out of the body, and was convoyed up 
above by ‘“‘a driver and a witness.”” “To it was shown a 
ledger of reckoning wherein two angels had set down all 
its deeds on earth. Even though the fate of each man 
hung around his neck from the beginning, still was each 
man’s soul held to a reckoning after death. He who 
had been pious on earth was translated to a garden of 
bliss after death; and there, clad in robes of shimmering 
green silk, he lolled forever on green-cushioned divans, 
(How like a desert Arab, to paint paradise a place that 
is green!) Fruit and forgiveness did the pious man en- 
joy in Paradise, gorging himself on ripe bananas that 
ne'er caused aching belly, and quaffing whole flagons of 
wine that ne’er caused aching head. Maidens of sur- 
passing beauty, large-eyed and well-rounded of hip— 
but modest withal, and “‘restraining their looks’’— 
served him there and brought him comfort. And thus 
did the pious man delight in his reward, living in Para- 
dise without labor or care, without want or fear of J 
want, throughout all the endless ages! . . . a 

But he who was a sinner, he who “‘believed not in 
Ailah nor fed the poor’’—he fared far otherwise. On 
his death his soul was torn violently from his body. 
Down into Hell that soul was hurled, there to wear a 
cloak of fire and drink scalding water and pus. With 
maces was the sinner beaten in Hell, until he begged 
piteously for release. But there was no release for him. 
No mercy could be shown him, nor could his torture 
cease, until at last the final Judgment Day arrived. But 
when that day did come, lo, he would be annihilated 
utterly! Not even his soul would remain existent. And 
the pious in Paradise would then be brought back to 





318 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


earth, and on a paradisiac earth they would revel in 
bliss forevermore! . . 

Thus would the prophet talk on with solemn mien 
to those who sat about him. And when one of them, 
shaking off the spell of the speaker's words, would ask 
in a scoffing tone: ‘Huh! Shall I, though reduced to 
dry bones, become alive ‘again?’’—then would the 
prophet give answer with a grim smile: “If thou dost 
doubt it, wait till the Judgment Day comes, and then 
thou wilt find out!”’ 

So would Mohammed labor with the strangers from 
far away places. And when those strangers went back 
to their homes, glowing reports of the strange prophet 
would go back with them. ‘The fame of Ubu’l-Kassim 
spread. “Throughout the length and breadth of the des- 
ert, people began to talk wonderingly of the Prophet 
of Allah who dwelt in Mecca. 


5 


NOW on the main caravan route north from Mecca 
there was a settlement called Yathrib which from of old 
had been a rival of the capital. And the elders of 
Yathrib, hearing of Mohammed and of his persecution 
at the hands of the elders of Mecca, sent secret emissaries 
to him, entreating him to take refuge in their midst. 
They even offered to make him the ruling sheikh of 
their city if he would come. And Mohammed did not 
reject their overtures. Perhaps he had begun to despair 
of ever attaining his end by “‘boring from within’”’ the 
city of Mecca. He may have begun to wonder whether 
he could not accomplish more by “kicking from with- 
out.”” So he sent his own emissaries back to Yathrib 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA Spf 


with word that he would come—on condition, however, 
that the men of Yathrib were willing to join him in a 
holy war to make Allah the god of all Arabia. 

But before the negotiations could be finally concluded, 
a rumor of what was on foot reached the ears of the 
rulers of Mecca. ‘They saw immediately that it would 
not do to temporize any longer. Mohammed was too 
dangerous a man to allow around, and, taboo or no 
taboo, he had to be destroyed. But, in orde: to dis- 
tribute the guilt, the ruling clans agreed to share equally 
in the crime. Each appointed one of its members to 
serve On an assassination committee, and on the night of 
the sixteenth of July, in the year 622, the committee 
broke into Mohammed's sleeping chamber to strike him 
dead. But when they rushed at the couch, behold, 
Mohammed was not there! His cousin Ali was lying 
in his place, and the prophet was nowhere in sight. 
Apprised of the plot, he had already escaped from the 
city long hours before the assassins set out for his house. 
And although the Meccans sent their fleetest camel-men 
to pursue after him on the road to Yathrib, they could 
not overtake him. Mohammed had guessed they would 
pursue him on the road north, and had gone south in- 
stead. With only Abu Bekr, his most trusted disciple, 
he stole away and hid in a cave far south in the desert. 
And there he lurked in trepidation many days. Abu 
Bekr was frankly terrified. ‘‘Behold, we are but two 
against a whole multitude,’’ he complained. But 
straightway Mahomet answered, ‘‘Nay, not two, but 
three—for Allah is with us!”’ 

But for all that he was so sure that Allah was with 
him, Mohammed took no chances. Only after weeks 


320 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


of hiding did he and his friend venture out into the open 
and begin to make their way north. For weeks they 
crawled furtively through the desert, until finally on 
Friday, the twentieth of September, they reached their 
goal. At last they were safe in Yathrib. 


6 


WITH that flight, the hejira as it is called in Arabic, 
the Mohammedan era begins. (To this day the Mos- 
lems date all records from the time of that Hejira, as 
all Christians date them from the supposed time of the 
birth of Jesus—and all chroniclers of the village of 
Hamlin date them from the supposed time of the com- 
ing of the Pied Piper.) Once in Yathrib, the prophet 
immediately set out to convert all who were in sight; 
and to a degree he was successful. But there was one 
element in the population that stubbornly refused to 
be won over. ‘There were in Yathrib several tribes of 
Jews that had lived in that region almost from the time 
when the Romans drove them out of their own home in 
Judea. They were by now hard to distinguish from the 
Arab tribes, differing from them, indeed, only in re- 
ligion. Despite more than five centuries of life in pagan 
Arabia, these Jews still worshipped their One God and 
prayed for their Messiah to come. When rumor first 
reached them of a prophet who was being hounded out 
of Mecca for preaching the idea of a One God, they of 
course were interested. In a moment of wild hopeful- 
ness they even wondered if that prophet might not 
really be their long-awaited Messiah. And when Mo- 
hammed arrived in Yathrib he made every effort to en- 
courage that impression. Revelations of a pro-Jewish 








WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA BZA 


nature now came to him thick and fast. He commanded 
his followers to turn as did the Jews toward Jerusalem 
when they prayed. He forbade them to eat pork or the 
meat of any animal that had not been ritually slaugh- 
tered; and he appointed the Jewish Day of Atonement 
the great holy day of the year. He even changed the 
name of his One God from Allah to Rachman—the 
“Merciful.”’ Out of all his following he chose a Jew 
to be his scribe to set down his revelations in the book 
that later came to be called the Koran. . . . But despite 
all these concessions, the Jews as a body refused to come 
over into his camp. [he moment they discovered his 
ignorance of the Holy Law and the Prophets, and his 
by now notorious weakness for women, they began to 
scoff at his pretensions, “Their poets wrote satirical bal- 
lads against him, and their elders refused to take him 
seriously. 

And thereupon Mohammed made a complete about- 
face. Realizing with chagrin that there was nothing to 
be hoped for from the Jews, he brought all his proselyt- 
ing energies once more to bear on his own people. Fresh 
revelations now came to him reversing the earlier ones, 
and declaring that the true direction of the worshipper 
in prayer was toward Mecca, not Jerusalem, and that — 
the great annual holy season was the old Arab Festival 
of Ramadhan, not the Jewish Day of Atonement. And 
with such concessions to the ancient paganism, the win- 
ning of converts from among the Arabs in and around 
Yathrib increased rapidly. 

But material problems began to trouble the prophet. 
His property in Mecca had been confiscated after his 
flight, and what wealth he had brought with him had 





322 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


_dwindled away in Yathrib because of bad investments. 
To add to his difficulties, scores of believers who had 
fled after him from Mecca were now wandering about 
in Yathrib without employment. It was clear, there- 
fore, that some means of providing for himself and his 
followers had to be found, and found immediately. So 
Mohammed gathered his followers together and sent 
them out to waylay caravans from Mecca. For almost 
a year he sent them out on such expeditions, until finally 
he saw that even highway robbery, when practiced ac- 
cording to the rules, was unprofitable. He was then 
forced, therefore, to practice the profession with no 
respect for the rules. “The Meccan caravans were too 
well armed during most of the year to be held up suc- 
cessfully. Only during the pilgrim season, when they 
were protected by that ancient inviolate taboo, did the 
caravans dare to sally forth unarmed. So now, in des- 
peration, Mohammed actually decided to stage attacks 
on them during that season. 

Such tactics amounted to an almost unprecedented 
outrage, and only by a stratagem could the prophet man- 
age to inveigle his followers into committing the first 
treacherous holdup. But once the deed was done, and 
the reward seemed to be not death but enormous booty, 
his followers—and most of the other Yathribites too— 
were quite willing to repeat the outrage. The Meccans 
leapt to arms immediately, however, for they realized 
that this thing put into jeopardy their whole future as 
the masters of Arabia’s commerce. ‘They sent out a 
whole army, and fierce battle was joined with the 
Yathribites. Mohammed did not fight in person in the 
battle. He seems to have been physically a rather weak 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 325 


man; even the sight of blood made him sick. “Tradition 
declares that he hid afar off, and kept his swiftest camels 
in readiness lest his men be defeated and flight become 
necessary. Even then he fainted soon after the battle 
began. . . . But when the battle was over, and the 
Yathribites emerged the victors, Mohammed came riding 
back into the city like a conquering hero. Substantially 
he was indeed the hero, for it was because of his astute- 
ness as a tactician in planning the battle that his 
army won. 

Mohammed was now the unchallenged master of the 
town, and its name was changed appropriately enough 
from Yathrib to Medina, ““The City (of the Prophet) .”’ 
He no longer troubled to try to win the unconverted by 
suasion. Instead he ruthlessly put them to the sword. 
Gone was the gentleness that had marked his preaching 
in the former days. Gone was his old confidence in 
the power of abstract truth. In Mecca he had declared, 
“We hurl the truth against the falsehood, and truth 
crashes into it so that falsehood vanishes.’’ But now he 
hurled armies instead. “When ye meet those who mis- 
believe,’ he now declared, ‘“‘strike off their heads or / 
hold them for ransom!” . . / 


7 


THE war with Mecca continued to rage, but in the 
end the Meccans were compelled to cry quits. Moham- 
med obtained consent to return as the virtual dictator 
of the city where but a few years earlier he had been 
a hunted criminal. And then he entered on a great 
holy war to win all Arabia to his cause. Armies were 


24 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 





MOHAMMED RETURNS TO MECCA 


sent north and others south to convert or slay in the 
name of Allah. And because the Byzantines and the 
Persians owned vast tracts of the desert in the north, 
Mohammed finally felt compelled to pit himself against 
them too. Nor did his ventures turn out unsuccessful 
even against such hosts. Somehow he could whip his 
followers into a frenzy of courage and recklessness. The 
Arabs had always loved violence, and he made violence 
holy for them. Mohammed assured them that to die 
fighting for Allah meant certain and immediate transla- 
tion to Allah’s Paradise. “There was but one way to 
prove complete faithfulness, he declared, and that was 
by complete resignation to the will of Allah. Islam, 
which may be translated ‘“‘submission,’’ he made the 
watchword and the name of his faith. 

Mohammed’s whole movement thus took on _ the 
character of a religious militarism. Islam was the army 





WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 325 


of Allah, and prayer was made a discipline quite like 
drill-duty in a modern army. ‘To this day a bystander 
thinks of a sentry sounding the alarm when he hears 
the muezzin uttering the call to prayer from his lofty 
minaret. An observer thinks of soldiers ‘‘forming fours’ 
and ‘‘presenting arms,’ when he sees the Moslems drawn 
up in ranks in their mosques and praying and prostrating 
themselves with almost mechanical precision. Actually 
the Moslems do form a religious army to this day. Mo- 
hammed welded them into such a body almost twelve 
hundred years ago. “If you help Allah, lo, Allah will | 
surely help you!’’ he cried to his followers. And be- 
cause the help Allah seemed to exact was just the sort 
the warlike Arabs had ever loved to give, they helped 
with irrepressible zest. In the name of Allah and His 
' Prophet, the army of Islam began to wage a Holy War 
that almost conquered the world! .. 

Mohammed only lived to see that war begin. In the 
year 632, just ten years after the Hejira, the prophet 
died. But he had lived long enough to set a movement 
on foot that has not halted to this day. Within twenty- 
five years after his death, his followers had already be- 
come masters not alone of Arabia, but also of Egypt, 
Palestine, Syria, Babylonia, and Persia. Within sev- 
enty-five years they had conquered all the northern 
coast of Africa and almost all of Spain. Another 
decade, and they were marching up into the interior of 
France. And today, twelve hundred years afterward, 
Islam, the religion founded by that amazing fruit-and- — 
produce merchant who saw visions in Mecca, stands next 
to Christianity as the most flourishing religion in the 
world. In twenty years, and without royal patronage, 





326 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


there was created in the heart of darkest Arabia a religion 
which today numbers well over two hundred million 
adherents! 5., 


8 


TO follow the Arabs on their great invasions and 
trace the tremendous influence exerted by them in Eu- 
rope, Asia, and Africa, would lead us far from the main 
purpose of this book. Europe owed to those invasions 
its awakening from that stupor which was the Dark 
Ages; and even Persia and India, along with Africa, 
were vitalized and advanced by them, too. It was 
the last (or was it only the latest?) plunge of the desert- 
folk out into the Fertile Crescent; and though it 
drowned the Crescent and half the rest of the world in 
blood, it also brought forth a blossoming of civilization 
almost unprecedented in history. 

Islam, one must remember, is a great and wondrous 
religion. Even in Mohammed's day it was, relatively 
at least, a high and noble faith. Few non-Moslems seem 
to realize this. “They remember only the petty vices and 
crimes of the prophet of Mecca, and forget entirely his 
indubitable religious genius. “They remember only the 
flagrant compromises, the arrant opportunism, the al- 
most blatant charlatanry, that marked his career after 
the Hejira. And, especially if they are Christians, they 
love to mull over reports of the inordinate interest Mo- 
hammed evinced in women in his later years. Chris- 
tianity has always looked on sex as in some way indecent 
and sinful; and for that reason most Christians cannot 
possibly associate a truly religious nature with an un- 
suppressed libido. But that is no more than a prejudice. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA GMAT 


Mohammed, despite his fondness for his harem, might 
have remained to his dying day a man of the noblest 
prophetic character. 

He did not remain that, of course. It cannot be gain- 
said that, after the Hejira and his first taste of triumph, 
the exalted prophet in Mohammed gave way to the 
greedy, ambitious, unscrupulous priest. “The “‘organ- 
izer’ in him triumphed. From then on he was no 
longer the daring iconoclast, the receiver of ‘‘revelations’’ 
which, even if not miraculously inspired, seemed at least 
spontaneous and sincere. After the Hejira the ‘‘reve- 
lations’ are quite blatantly premeditated forgeries. 
They are long editorials circulated in the name of Allah 
to save the seamy face of the prophet. In the days 
when Mohammed was suffered to talk only to strangers 
as he wandered about in the bazaars of Mecca his doc- 
trine had been superbly ethical in character. ‘“‘Blessed 
are they,” he then declared, ‘‘who are blameless as re- 
spects women, who are charitable, who talk not vainly, 
who are humble, who observe their pledges and cove- 
nants, and who guard their prayers; for they shall in- 
herit Paradise.’”’ “The liquor of triumph had not yet 
gone to his head; it had not yet even touched his lips. 
And he had been still a kindly, earnest teacher of love. 
‘Paradise,’ he had then declared, “‘is prepared for those 
who expend in alms, who repress their rage, and pardon 
men. For Allah loves the kind.’’ ‘To endure and 
to pardon is the wisdom of life.’’ Or again: ‘Let no 
man treat his neighbor as he himself would dislike to be 
treated.”” Or still again: ‘‘Let us be like trees that 
yield their fruit to those who throw stones at them.”’ 

Nor was there aught of the ritualist in Mohammed 


328 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


then. When a man came and said to the prophet: 
“Behold, my mother has died; what shall I do for the 
good of her soul?’’—-Mohammed answered: “Dig a 
well, that the thirsty may have water to drink! . 
The exigencies of empire-building had not yet arisen to 
demand a vast army bound by a rigid discipline of 
prayer and alms-giving. ‘“‘One hour of justice,’’ he had 
then said, “‘is worth more than seventy years of prayer.” 
-And: “Every good act is charity: bringing water to 
the thirsty, removing stones and thorns from the road, 
even smiling in thy brother’s face.” 

Nor, finally, had there been anything of the doc- 
trinaire in him then. When confronted by those who 
told him to his face that they did not believe his words, 
his only response had been the challenge: ‘‘Bring ye 
then a better revelation, and I shall follow it.” 

But once success began to come to him, the worst in 
his nature revealed itself. His personal life became sor- 
did, and his spiritual integrity was sapped. His craving 
for increase of dominion led him to reduce his standards 
until the mere recital of a formula—La illah il’allah, 
Muhammad rasoul allahi, ‘“There is no God but Allah, 
and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah’’— that and the 
paying of a tax, were enough to make one a convert. 
Later even the formula was overlooked, and only the 
tax was insisted upon. On occasion Mohammed even 
resorted to buying converts! 

As a result, the very paganism which Islam hae set 
out to destroy began to destroy Islam. The idolatrous 
practice of the hayjj, the pilgrimage to the Kaaba, was 
made one of the dominant elements in the religion. To 
this day it is counted of major importance. Even now 


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ON THE WAY TO MECCA 


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329 


330 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


the Moslem pilgrims from every end of the earth can 
be seen dragging their way on foot or by camel to 
Mecca. Two hundred thousand of them brave the 
dangers of the desert each year in order to come to the 
holy city. At five miles distance from it they halt, wash, 
pray, put on clean seamless gowns, and then proceed 
bare-headed and barefoot to the holy shrine. They 
reverently kiss the black stone, solemnly go around the 
Kaaba three times running and four times walking, run 
to a neighboring holy hill seven times, run to a second 
holy hill, and then stop to catch their breath while they 
listen toa sermon. Finally they spend the night on the 
holy Mount Muzdalifa nearby, and after throwing 
missiles at three unholy rocks in the valley below, they 
go back to their homes in far Tunis or Bombay or per- 
haps Samarkand, and are at peace. ‘They have per- 
formed the hayj, the pilgrimage, the holy act that earns 
them the right to wear verdant sashes around their 
fezzes, in token of the verdant Paradise they will surely 
inherit when they die... . 

But the old idolatry against which Mohammed in- 
veighed in his early ministry has returned in more than 
the hajj. Just as Mohammed himself accepted the 
Kaaba, so his followers accepted the lesser idolatrous 
shrines scattered throughout the desert. Of course the 
surrender was not made openly. Exactly as in Catholic 
Christendom, the local djinns and goddesses were made 
over into Mohammedan saints. ‘To this day throughout 
the Moslem lands those little shrines can be seen nestling 
amid the hills or in the oases. Nominally they are 
memorials to old holy men; but actually they are often 
memorials to far older djinns. 








WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 531 











THE SHRINE OF A DESERT SAINT 


The inundation of Islam by these returning tides of 
paganism began long before Mohammed died, and the 
further Islam’s shores extended, the more sweeping be- 
came that flood. In India the Moslem faith took over 
many of the characteristics of Hinduism. It became mys- 
tical and ascetic, inducing thousands of souls to retire 
and seek communion with Allah in the depths of the 
Indian jungles. It also took over many of the Hindu 
superstitions. The rosary, for instance, which was an 
emblem of the Indian god, Shiva, was made a ceremonial 
object in Islam. Ninety-nine beads were strung on a, 


wb Ws THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


cord, and each bead was made to represent one of the 
ninety-nine names of Allah. (It was not long before 
the Moslem theologians had succeeded in inventing 
ninety-nine names for the Unnamable.) To this day 
the pious Moslem tells his beads each day, ‘‘keeping his 
tongue moist’’—and his fingers nimble—in the remem- 
brance of Allah. | 

Islam, like every other healthy religion, has been in 
a state of incessant flux. Long centuries ago it grew to 
be as unlike the simple and homogeneous creed of Mo- 
hammed as Christianity became unlike the creed of Paul. 
In many lands it contrived to advance, became richer in 
emotion, deeper in intelligence, and nobler in spirit. In 
certain other lands it decayed and degenerated, becom- 
ing crude and animistic. Like Christianity, Islam was 
from the first an elastic faith, accommodating itself gen- 
erously to the culture of each land which it sought to 
conquer. Necessarily, therefore, it was many times rent 
by schisms, and today there are some seventy-two sects 
init. “The largest of the unorthodox groups, the Shiite 
sect in Persia, broke away in defense of the issue that 
Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali, was a veritable Imam, or 
divine incarnation almost like the Prophet himself. Out 
of the Shiite came in turn the Sufi sect, which main- 
tained that Ali was only the first of a long line of such 
Imams, and that even ordinary men could become almost 
divine by a process of asceticism and mysticism. But 
most of the other sects are small and obscure, and arose 
out of piddling metaphysical or political differences. 
And between many of these sects there has been a rivalry 
and an animosity almost—but never quite—as bitter as 
that between the sects in Christianity. 


WHAT HAPPENED IN ARABIA 333 


9 


YET, for all the paganism and bigotry that still loom 
large in the religion of Islam, it remains nevertheless a 
great and wondrous faith. It has been one of the most 
effective civilizing forces in the history of Africa and 
Asia, and in a measure also in that of Europe. In Arabia 
itself it accomplished a social revolution. It condemned 
the common practice of infanticide in the case of girls, 
restricted the dealing in slaves, opposed gambling and 
drunkenness, and almost put an end to the devastating 
tribal feuds. And, incredible as it may sound, it also 
brought about a marked improvement in the condition 
of the desert women. Limitless polygamy had been the 
unquestioned law in Arabia from the time the pre- 
historic and perhaps mythical matriarchate came to an | 
end. Not until Mohammed came was that practice re- 
stricted so that a man might have no more than four 
wives at a time... . 

But these social ameliorations were after all the lesser 
gifts of Islam. “They were precious to those who\ 
profited by them, but hardly of any considerable world- 
significance. “The supreme gift of Islam was the ideal 
of unity which it somehow drilled into the heads of a 
hundred races—not merely the unity of God, but even 
more the unity of mankind. And preaching that ideal, 
commanding submission to the Oneness of the Universe 
as the highest of all virtues, it revolutionized life for 
millions of fearful souls. It robbed them of the terror 
which aloneness had previously brought to them. It 
gave them strength and a feeling of security, telling 
them they were each a part of a vast and invincible 


334 THIS BELIEVING WORLD 


Whole. Every true believer was a soldier in an army, 
an international—and some day, pray Allah, universal 
—army that could not possibly fail to be victorious in 
the end. So what was there to fear? Life? It was 
fixed and settled for the true believer. All he had to 
do was live according to that manual-at-arms which is 
the Koran. He had merely, to pray punctiliously, eat 
ritually, provide alms regularly, and give himself to the 
spreading of the name of Allah—and his reward was 
certain. “[he way of life for him was fixed, and its 
reason and justification, too. He had but to submit 
and accept his kismet, his fate, lashing his body and soul 
to that Rock of Ages which is Allah—and Paradise was 
COrCAt ona eibe 

Every other great religion taught more or less the 
same doctrine, but none with such fierceness and unre- 
straint. Islam excluded no man from the army of 
Allah, magnifying the requirements until they could 
attract even the most advanced of civilized men, and 
minifying them so that they could appeal even to the 
most degraded of savages. And that is why to this day 
Islam can still win converts with twice the ease of any 
other religion. “That is why to this day Islam is one of 
the mightiest institutions on earth for the ordering and 
beautifying of life in at least the ‘‘backward”’ lands. .. . 





SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS 


Encyclopedias and Source-Books 
Canney, M. A., An Encyclopedia of Religions. lv. (N. Y., 
1921). 


Hastings, J., editor, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. 
VZV (Ne Ya LOTS 21902) < 


Miller, Max, editor, Sacred Books of the East. 50 v. 
(Oxford, 1879-1910). 


Textbooks 
Barton, G. A., The Religions of the World. (Chicago, 
1919). 


Hopkins, E. W., The History of Religions. (N. Y., 1918). 
Hume, R. E., The World’s Living Religions. (N. Y., 1925). 
Jastrow, Morris, Jr., The Study of Religion. (N. Y., 1901). 
Jevons, F. B., Comparative Religion. (Cambridge, 1913). 


Martin, A. W., Great Religious Teachers of the East. (N. Y.., 
1911); The World’s Great Semitic Religions. (N. 
Naren) ) ; 

Montgomery, J. A., editor, Religions Past and Present. 
(Phila., 1918). 


Moore, G. F., History of Religions. DAN aI ANG Ns ck oe bode 
1920) 


PRIMITIVE RELIGION 


Frazer so Phe, Golden* Bough... <b.v,, (CN; Y.; 1922); 
Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. (N. Y., 1914); Totemism 
and Exogamy. (London, 1910). 

Jevons, F, B., Introduction of History of Religion, (Lon- 
don, 1896). 


Keel 


336 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Lang, Andrew, The Making of Religion. (N. Y., 1900). 
Marett, R. R., The Threshold of Religion. (London, 1914). 
Moore, G. F., Birth and Growth of Religion. (N. Y., 1923). 


THE CELTS 


Anwyl, Edward, Celtic Religion in Prehistoric Times. (Lon- 
don, 1906). 


MacCulloch, J. A., Religion of the Ancient Celts. (London, 
NR 


Rhys, J., Celtic Heathendom. (London, 1888). 


THE BABYLONIANS 


Jastrow, Morris, Jr., Religion of Babylonia and Assyria. 
(N. Y., 1898); Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions. 
(Nay el GUS )G 


King, L. W., Babylonian Religion and Mythology. (Lon- 
don, 1899). 


Rogers, R. W., The Religion of the Babylonians and As- 
syrians. (N. Y., 1908). 


‘THE EGYPTIANS 
Breasted, J. H., Development of Religion and Thought in 
Ancient Egypt. (N. Y., 1905). 


Erman, A., Handbook of Egyptian Religion. (London, 
1907). 


Mackenzie, D. A., The Myths of Egypt. (London, 1914). 


Petrie, W. M. Flinders, Religion and Conscience in Ancient 
Egypt. (N. Y., 1898). 


THE GREEKS 


Fairbanks, A., Handbook of Greek Religion. (N. Y., 1910). 
Farnell, L. R., The Cults of the Greek States. 5 v. (Oxford, 
1896-1909). 


Harrison, Jane E., Themis, a Study of the Social Origins of 
Greek Religion. (Cambridge, 1912). 





SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY byl 
Murray, Gilbert, Four Stages of Greek Religion. (N. Y., 
1912). 


THE ROMANS 


Carter, Jesse B., The Religious Life of Ancient Rome. 
(Boston, 1911). 


Cumont, F., The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. 
(Chicago, 1911); The Mysteries of Mithra. (Chicago, 
1903). 


Fowler, W. W., Roman Ideas of Deity in Last Century be- 
fore Christian Era. (London, 1914). 


Glover, T. R., The Conflict of Religions in the Early 
Roman Empire. (London, 1909). 


THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA 


Brahmanism and Hinduism 


Barnet, L. D., Antiquities of India. (London, 1914). 
Bloomfield, M., The Religion of the Veda. (N. Y., 1908). 
Farquhar, J. N., A Primer of Hinduism. (Oxford, 1912). 
Hopkins, E. W., The Religions of India. (N. Y., 1898). 
Pratt, J. B., India and Its Faiths. (Boston, 1915). 


Jainism 
Jaini, J., Outlines of Jainism. (Cambridge, 1916). 


Stevenson, Mrs. S., The Heart of Jainism. (Oxford, 1915); 
Notes on Modern Jainism. (Oxford, 1910). 


Buddhism 


Carpenter, J. E., Buddhism and Christianity. (N. Y., 1923). 

Davids, T. W. Rhys, Buddhism. (London, 1914). 

Davids, Mrs. T. W. Rhys, Buddhism. (Home University 
Library). 

Saunders, K. J., Story of Buddhism. (Oxford 1916); 
one and Buddhists of Southern Asia. (N. Y., 


338 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 


THE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 


Douglass, R. K., Confucianism and Taoism. (London, 
1900). 


Giles, H. A., Confucianism and its Rivals. (N. Y., 1915): 
China and the Chinese. (N. Y., 1902). 


Legge, James, The Religions of China. (N. Y., 1881); 
The Chinese Classics. 8v. (Oxford, 1861-85). 


Soothill, W. E., Three Religions of China. (London, 1913). 


ZOROASTRIANISM 
Jackson, A. V. W., Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran. 
CN SY Sao Ob): 


Moulton, J. H., Early Zoroastrianism. (London, 1913); 
The Treasure of the Magi, a study of Modern Zoro- 
astrianism. (Oxford, 1918). 


JUDAISM 
Abrahams, I., Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. (Phila., 
1906). 


Bailey and Kent, History of the Hebrew Commonwealth. 
CNY te 20) 


Barton, G. A., Religion of Israel. (N. Y., 1918). 


Browne, Lewis, Stranger Than Fiction: a Short History of 
the Jews. (N. Y., 1925). 


Graetz, H., History of the Jews. 6v. (Phila., 1891). 
Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 v. (N. Y., 1905). 


CHRISTIANITY 
Outline of Christianity. 5 v. (N. Y., 1926). 
Case, S. J., The Evolution of Christianity. (Chicago, 1914). 


Clemen, Carl, Primitive Christianity and its Non-Jewish 
Sources. (Edin., 1912). 


Hartt, R. L., The Man Himself. (N. Y., 1923). 


Jackson, F. J. F., Introduction to Church History, Life of 
StePanlintins x... 920) 


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 339 


Klausner, J., Jesus of Nazareth. (N. Y., 1926). 
Montefiore, C. J., Judaism and Saint Paul. (London, 1900). 
Renan, Ernest, Life of Jesus. 


Smith, G. B., editor, A Guide to the Study of Christian 
Religion. (Chicago, 1916). 


+ ISLAM 


Ameer, Ali, The Spirit of Islam. (London, 1922). 
Goldziher, I., Mohammed and Islam. (New Haven, 1917). 


Houtsma, N. T., editor, Encyclopedia of Islam. 25 parts. 
London, 1923). 


Hughes, T. P., Dictionary of Islam. (London, 1885). 


Margoliouth, D. S., Mohammedanism. (Home University 
Library). 


Muir, Sir William, Mahomet and Islam. (London, 1895). 





INDEX 


A Arabian Desert, 223, 305 


AP cea in Rio 
Abydos, 84 ; 


Achilles, 98 Aristotle, 91, 94 


Ark, 49, 
Adonijah, 235 Bile ahd 


Armenian, 201 
Adonis, 106, 277 Aryan, 60, 90, 119, 199 
Aegean, 89 


A , ’ 
Aegean Islands, 226 shtoreth, 69, 236 


Ashura, 19 
Afghanistan, 191 ia ee 
aan Asshur, 241 


Agriculture, 43 
Abriman, 211, 217, 314 
Ahura Mazda, 203 


Assumption of the Virgin, 294 
Assyria, 233 


A ; 
Akhetaton, 79 Lautan 
; Astrology, 70 
Akirvati, 140 Pee oy 
Allah, 20, 305, 309 ; 
Athena, 90 
Alexander, 217 
: Athens, 174 
Ali, 332 
ieee De 64 Atman, 32 
aints ay, Aton, 78 


All Souls, Festival of, 295 
American Indians, 76 
Amon, 76, 78 

Amos, 237, 240 

pmianite, .1L99,°205,,216 
Anarchism, 288 B 
Anaxagoras, 94 

Ancestor worship in China, 169 Baaie2) 17230 


Attis, 99, 106, 277 
Augustus, 107 
Avatar, 153, 285 
Avesta, 201 


Anglicanism, 300 Babel, Tower of, 71 
Angra Mainyu, 203 Babylonia, 325 

Animism, 32 Babylonian Exile, 235 
Anu, 68 Babylonians, 65, 223, 235 
Aphrodite, 69 Bacchus, 106 

Apollo, 91 Banyan Tree, 138 

Arabia, 305 Baptism, 99 


341 





342 


INDEX 





Bel, 68, 241 

Bellona, 106 

Bel-Marduk, 68 

Beltane, 63 

Benares, 143, 164 

Beni Hasan, 85 

Beth El, 238 

Bhagavad-Gita, 153 

Bible, 154 

Black Friday, 106 

Bodhisattvas, 146 

Bohemia, 300 

Bombay, 218 

Book of the Dead, 88 

Brahma;}125.115360::152,) 153 5106; 
160 

Brahmanas, 124 

Brahmanism, 119 

Brahmins, 122 

Bridget, 61, 70, 294, 296 

Buddha, 134, 143, 160, 175, 184, 
191, 193, 200, 232, 245, 264 

Buddhism, 134, 190, 191 

Burmah, 149 


C 


Caesar, Julius, 63 

Calvin, 300 

Canaan? 25 

Canaanites, 224, 235 

Caste, 122, 140, 150 

Catholicism, 293, 300 

Celts, 60 

Ceylon, 147, 149 

Chandraguptra, 146 

China, 148 

Chinese, 223 

Chou, 184 

Christ, 148, 154, 276, 281 (see 
Jesus) 

Christianity, 110, 218, 257, 290 


Christians, 156 
Christmas, 295 
Chungtu, 176 
Church, 39 
Cilicia, 281 
Circumcision, 48 
Communism, 288 


Confucianism, 169, 193 


Confucius, 175, 184, 188, 245 
Constantine, 290 

Corybantes, 296 

Crete, 89 

Crosses, 37 

Crusades, 156 

Cybele, 69, 104, 294, 296 
Cynics, 108 

Cyrus, 216, 246 


D 


Dagon, 232, 241 

Dalai Lama, 148 
Damascus, 274, 281 
Daniel, 218 

Dark Ages, 326 

David, 233 

Day of Atonement, 321 
Dead, Book of, 88 
Deutero-Isaiah, 244 
Deva, 205 

Deviltry, 205 

Diana, 102 

Diaspora, 248 
Dionysus, 97, 106, 277 
Divinity, 205 

Druids, 61, 70 

Dyansh Pitar, 120 


E 


Ea, 68 
Eden, 224 
Egypt, 44, 171, 225, 325 





INDEX ahh, 


Egyptians, 75 George, St., Festival of, 294 
Eightfold Noble Path, 139 Golden Bough, 35, 62 
Eleusinian mysteries, 99 Gospels, 259, 276, 288 
Elijah, 235 Greece, 171 
Elysian Fields, 98 Greeks, 89 
Empedocles, 94 
England, 300 Hi 
Epilepsy, 307 Hades, 90, 98 
Epistles, 288 Hajj, 328, 330 
Ethiopians, 239 Hallowe’en, 64 
Etruscans, 102 Hamlin, 320 
Euphrates, 224 Haoma, 199, 205, 215 
Euripides, 94 Haram, 225 
Exodus, 226 Hariti, 148 
Ezekiel, 175 Heaven, 169 
Hebrews, 49, 103, 230 

F Hera, 90 
Feng-Shui, 196 Heraclitus, 94 
Fertile Crescent, 224, 326 Himayana, 145, 147 
Festivals, 46 Hinduism, 150, 331 
Fetishism, 36 Hittites, 224 
Fire-altars, 205 Holy Ghost, 278 
Five Books of Moses, 231, 243 Holy Roman Empire, 299 
Flood, 73 Horeb, 229 
Four Truths, 139 Horseshoes, 37 
Francis, St., of Assisi, 300 Horus, 83, 148, 286 
Fraser, James G., 35, 62 Hosea, 239 
Free-Will, 156 Huns, 299 
Fryana, 210 Huss, John, 300 

G I 
Galatia, 281 Ibrahim, 316 
Galilee, 259 Idol, 38 
Ganges, 121, 134, 164 Ikhnaton, 78, 87, 88, 232, 264 
Ganges Valley, 130 India, 331 
Gathas, 201, 210 Indian Metaphysics, 159 
Gaul, 174 Inquisition, 300 
Gautama, 245 Indra, 120 
Gautama, Siddharta, 134 Indus, 121 
Genius, 100, 108 Iran, 199 


Gentiles, 250 Isaiah, 240 





okey INDEX 


Ishtar, 67, 68, 89, 104, 305 Krishna, 153, 158, 200 
Isis, 69, 83, 106, 148, 294 Krishto, 154 
Islam, 149, 324 Kung-fu-tze (see Confucius), 175 
Ishmael, 316 
Israel, 233 " 

J Lagash, 67 

Lao-Tze, 184, 200, 232 
Jainism, 129 Lares, 101 
Janus, 101 Laud, Bishop, 300 
Japan, 148 Lhassa, 148 
Jehovah, (see Yahveh) 49, 229 Libya, 225 
Jeremiah, 175, 241, 307 Logos, 278, 285 
Jerusalem, 19, 321, 240 Lucky Stones, 36 
Jesus, 84, 184, 200, 226, 247, lLugnasad, 64 
2D AM20 fers LOS. Gos 2.0 Lupercalia, 101 
Jews, 315, 320 Luther, 300 
Jina, 130 
John, 287 M 
John the Baptizer, 261, 247, 274 
John, St., Festival of, 294 Ma, 106 
Judah, 233 Macedonia, 281 
Judaism, 151, 216, 223 Magi, 215 
Judaism, Orthodox, 250 Mahabharta, 153, 158 
Judaism, Reform, 250 Mahavira, 129, 137, 141, 160, 
Judges, 232 175, 200, 245 
Juno, 100 Mahayana, 145, 147 
Jupiter, 101, 120 Malay Archipelago, 40 
Mani, 216 


Manichaeism, 216 


“ Manu, Code of, 151 
Kaaba, 306, 330 Maponus, 61 
Kaaba Stone, 38 Marduk, 68 
Karma, Law of, 142 Mark, 287 
Kashmir, 147 Marriage, 48 
Kenites, 229 Mars, 101 
Kenosis, 189 Mary, 148, 285, 294 
Khadija, 309 Mayday, 63 
Kiang-si, 190 Maypole Dances, 64 
King, 178 Mecca, 38, 306 
Kismet, 334 Medicine-Man, 34, 224, 233, 318, 


Koran, 218, 321 323 





INDEX 


345 





Memphis, 76 

Mencius, 182 

Mesopotamia, 65 

Messiah, 242, 258, 320 

Methodism, 300 

Mezuzoth, 37 

Micah, 240 

Middle Path, 139 

Midsummer Night, 64 

Minerva, 102 

Minoans, 89 

Mithraism, 218, 285 

Mithraists, 291 

Mithras, 109, 120, 199, 205, 216 

Mohammed, 184, 218, 306, 314, 
321 

Moslems, 156 

Moloch, 231, 236 

Moore, George Foot, 28 

Moses, 184, 200, 226, 229, 232 

Mother of the Gods, Great (see 
Cybele), 104 

Mt. Sinai, 49 

Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 288 

Muzdalifa, Mount, 330 

Mysteries, 96, 104, 277 

Mysticism, 161 


N 


Nabu, 68 

Nathan, 235 

Nazarenes, 274 
Nazareth, 259 
Nebuchadnezzar, 241 
Nestorians, 148 
Nevi-im, 235 

New Thought, 159 

Ni, 182 

Ningirsu, 67, 68 
Nirvana, 127, 139, 164 
Noble Eightfold Path, 144 


O 


Oberammergau, 84 

Odysseus, 98 

Ogmius, 61 

Olympus, 91 

Ombus, 76 

Ormuzd, 211, 249 

Orpheus, 97, 106, 277 
Orphic Mysteries, 99 

Osiris, 82, 99, 106, 241, 277 


y 


Pacifism, 288 

Palestine, 325 

Parilia, 294 

Parsees, 218, 249 

Parvata the Terrible, 157 

Passover, 272 

Pater-familias, 101 

Paul (see Saul of Tarsus) 283, 
294, 298 

Peking, 170, 176 

Penates, 101 

Pentateuch, 265 

Persia, 325, 332 

Peter’s, St., 104 

Pharisaic Plague, 265 

Philo, 278 

Philistines, 234 

Phoenicians, 223, 224, 234 

Pied Piper, 320 

Pilate, 271 

Plato, 94 

Polygamy, 333 

Pontifex, Maximus, 102 

Pork, 40 

Poseidon, 90 

Prayer, 39 

Predestination, 156 

Promised Land, 224 





346 


Prostitution, holy, 69 
Protagoras, 95 
Protestants, 148, 151 
Protestantism, 300 
Ptah, 76 

Pyramids, 85, 171, 225 
Pythagoras, 94 


Q 
Quakerism, 300 


R 


Rabbis, 265 
Rachman, 321 
Rama, 155 
Ramadhan, 321 
Ramayana, 153, 155 
Re, 80 

Resurrection, 273 
Revelation, 218 
Rhea, 90 

Rig Veda, 121 
Ritual, 54 

Romans, 100 

Rome, 174, 248, 257 
Rosary, 156, 331 


S 
Sabbath, 74, 285 


Sacraments, 47 
Sacrifices, 39, 54 
Samhain, 64 
Samuel, 235 
Sangha, 133 
Saracens, 299 
Satans, 217 
Saturnalia, 102 
Saul of Tarsus, 279, 281, 283 
Semites, 66, 223 
Servia, 290 


INDEX 


Set, 76, 83 

Sex, 46 

Sex in Hinduism, 157 
Sex in Mysticism, 161 
Shabatum, 74 
Shaman, 34 
Shamanism, 36 


Shamash, 68 


Sheol, 217 
Shiite sect, 332 
Shinto, 148 
Shiva, 152, 156, 331 
Shu, 178 

Siam, 149 

Sin, 53, 68 
Sinai, 229 
Socrates, 94, 95 
Solomon, 233 
Solon, 171 
Soman 204205 
Sphinx, 76 

St. John’s Day, 64 
Stoics, 94 
Stonehenge, 61 
Sufi sect, 332 
Suleiman, 316 
Sumerians, 224 
Sun Day, 110 
Sunday, 285 
Swami, 159 
Syria, 325 


1% 


Taboo, 40 

Taif, 314 

Talmud, 151, 249 
Tammuz, 67, 106 
sLantray 57 

Tao, 186 

Taoism, 148, 183, 193 
Tao-Teh-king, 185 





Tauroboleum, 105 
Teh, 186 


Ten Commandments, 229 ; 


Ten Tribes, 233 - 
Thales, 94 

Thebes, 76 
Theosophical Societies, 159 
Theudas, 274 

Thibet, 148 

Three Jewels, 133, 186 
Three Truths, 195 
Thugs, 157 

Tigris, 224 

Tower of Silence, 212 
Transmigration, 126 
T’ueb-shi, 190 
Turanians, 204, 209 
Turkestan, 191 
Tutenkhamen, 80 


U 


Ubu'l-Kassim, 306 
Unitarianism, 300 
Untouchables, 165 
Upanishads, 125, 203 
Ur of the Chaldees, 225 
Urkagina, King, 71 


Vv 


Varnu, 122 

Vatican Hill, 104 

Vedas, 121, 130, 150, 203 
Venus, 68, 69 


INDEX 347 


Vesta, 101 
Vishnu, 152, 156 


W 


Wall of Law, 265 
Wells, H. G., 5, 218 
Wind-ball, 32 

Wu, 190 

Wu Wei, 186 
Wycliffe, 300 


Xx 
Xenophanes, 94 


Y 


Yahveh, 229, 239, 305 

Yathrib (see Medina), 318 

Yogi, 159, 160 

Young Men’s Buddhist Association, 
148 


Z 


Zabazins, 97 

Zagreus, 97 

Zarathustra, 199 

Zealots, 258, 260 

Zeus Pater, 90, 101, 120 

Zionism, 251 

Zoroaster, 109, 175, 199, 205 
220252.324..20432307 

Zoroastrianism, 199, 216, 218 

Zoroastrians, 249, 251 

Zwingli, 300 






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